by Lee Child
“My dad wasn’t in the military.”
“But mine was, so there’s fifty percent right away. Better than most other professions. And you know what the clincher is?”
“What?”
“Something we should have figured long ago. But we just skated right on by. We missed it, totally. The two dead Armstrongs . How the hell do you just find two white guys with fair hair and blue eyes and the right dates of birth and the right faces and above all the right first and last names? That’s a very tall order. But these guys did it. And there’s only one practical way of doing it, which is the national DMV database. Driver’s license information, names, addresses, dates of birth, photographs. It’s all right there, everything you need. And nobody can get into it, except cops, who can dial it right up.”
Neagley was silent for a moment.
“OK, they are cops,” she said.
“They sure are. And we’re brain dead for not spotting it on Tuesday.”
“But cops would have heard of Armstrong long ago, wouldn’t they?”
“Why would they? Cops know about their own little world, that’s all, same as anybody else. If you worked in some rural police department in Maine or Florida or outside San Diego you might know the New York Giants quarterback or the Chicago White Sox center fielder but there’s no reason why you would have heard of North Dakota’s junior senator. Unless you were a politics junkie, and most people aren’t.”
Neagley drove on. Way to the right, far to the east, a narrow band of sky was a fraction lighter than it had been. It had turned the color of dark charcoal against the blackness beyond it. The snow was no heavier, no lighter. The big lazy flakes drifted in from the mountains, floating level, sometimes rising.
“So which is it?” she asked. “Maine or Florida or San Diego? We need to know, because if they’re flying in they won’t be armed with anything they can’t pick up here.”
“California is a possibility,” Reacher said. “Oregon isn’t. They wouldn’t have revealed their specific identity to Armstrong if they still lived in Oregon. Nevada is a possibility. Or Utah or Idaho. Anywhere else is too far.”
“For what?”
“To be on a reasonable radius from Sacramento. How long does a stolen cooler of ice last?”
Neagley said nothing.
“Nevada or Utah or Idaho,” Reacher said. “That’s my guess. Not California. I think they wanted a state line between them and the place they went for the thumb. Feels better, psychologically. I think they’re a long day’s drive from Sacramento. Which means they’re probably a long day’s drive from here, too, in the other direction. So I think they’ll be coming in by road, armed to the teeth.”
“When?”
“Today, if they’ve got any sense.”
“The bat was mailed in Utah,” Neagley said.
Reacher nodded. “OK, so scratch Utah. I don’t think they wanted to mail anything in their home state.”
“So Idaho or Nevada,” Neagley said. “We better watch for license plates.”
“This is a tourist destination. There are going to be plenty of out-of-state plates. Like we’ve got Colorado plates.”
“How will they aim to do it?”
“Edward Fox,” Reacher said. “They want to survive, and they’re reasonable with a rifle. Hundred and twenty yards in Minnesota, ninety in D.C. They’ll aim to get him in the church doorway, somewhere like that. Maybe out in the graveyard. Drop him right next to somebody else’s headstone.”
Neagley slowed and turned right onto Route 220. It was a better road, wider, newer blacktop. It ran with a river wandering next to it. The sky was lighter in the east. Up ahead was a faint glow from the city of Casper, twenty miles north. The snow was still blowing in from the west, slow and lazy.
“So what’s our plan?” Neagley asked.
“We need to see the terrain,” Reacher said.
He looked sideways out the window. He had seen nothing but darkness since leaving Denver.
They stopped on the outer edge of Casper for gas and more coffee and a bathroom. Then Reacher took a turn at the wheel. He picked up Route 87 north out of town and drove fast for thirty miles because Route 87 was also I-25 again and was wide and straight. And he drove fast because they were late. Dawn was in full swing to the east and they were still well short of Grace. The sky was pink and beautiful and the light came in brilliant horizontal shafts and lit the mountainsides in the west. They were meandering through the foothills. On their right, to the east, the world was basically flat all the way to Chicago and beyond. On their left, distant in the west, the Rocky Mountains reared two miles high. The lower slopes were dotted with stands of pine and the peaks were white with snow and streaked with gray crags. For miles either side of the ribbon of road was high desert, with sagebrush and tan grasses blazing purple in the early sun.
“Been here before?” Neagley asked.
“No,” he said.
“We need to turn,” she said. “Soon, east toward Thunder Basin.”
He repeated the name in his head, because he liked the sound of the words. Thunder Basin. Thunder Basin.
He made a shallow right off the highway onto a narrow county road. There were signposts to Midwest and Edgerton. The land fell away to the east. Pines a hundred feet tall threw morning shadows a hundred yards long. There was endless ragged grassland interrupted here and there by the remains of old industrial enterprises. There were square stone foundations a foot high and tangles of old iron.
“Oil,” Neagley said. “And coal mining. All closed down eighty years ago.”
“The land looks awful flat,” Reacher said.
But he knew the flatness was deceptive. The low sun showed him creases and crevices and small escarpments that were nothing compared to the mountains on his left but were a long way from being flat. They were in a transition area, where the mountains shaded randomly into the high plains. The geological tumult of a million years ago rippled outward all the way to Nebraska, frozen in time, leaving enough cover to hide a walking man in a million different places.
“We need it to be totally flat,” Neagley said.
Reacher nodded at the wheel. “Except for maybe one little hill a hundred yards from where Armstrong is going to be. And another little hill a hundred yards back from it, where we can watch from.”
“It isn’t going to be that easy.”
“It never is,” Reacher said.
They drove on, another whole hour. They were heading north and east into emptiness. The sun rose well clear of the horizon. The sky was banded pink and purple. Behind them the Rockies blazed with reflected light. Ahead and to the right the grasslands ran into the distance like a stormy ocean.
There was no more snow in the air. The big lazy flakes had disappeared.
“Turn here,” Neagley said.
“Here?” He slowed to a stop and looked at the turn. It was just a dirt road, leading south to the middle of nowhere.
“There’s a town down there?” he asked.
“According to the map,” Neagley said.
He backed up and made the turn. The dirt road ran a mile through pines and then broke out with a view of absolutely nothing.
“Keep going,” Neagley said.
They drove on, twenty miles, thirty. The road rose and fell. Then it peaked and the land fell away in front of them into a fifty-mile-wide bowl of grass and sage. The road ran ahead through it straight south like a faint pencil line and crossed a river in the base of the bowl. Two more roads ran into the bridge from nowhere. There were tiny buildings scattered randomly. The whole thing looked like a capital letter K, lightly peppered with habitation where the three lines of the letter met.
“That’s Grace, Wyoming,” Neagley said. “Where this road crosses the south fork of the Cheyenne River.”
Reacher eased the Yukon to a stop. Put it in park and crossed his arms on the top of the wheel. Leaned forward with his chin on his hands and stared ahead through the windshield.
&n
bsp; “We should be on horses,” he said.
“Wearing white hats,” Neagley said. “With Colt .45s.”
“I’ll stick with the Steyrs,” Reacher said. “How many ways in?”
Neagley traced her finger over the map.
“North or south,” she said. “On this road. The other two roads don’t go anywhere. They peter out in the brush. Maybe they head out to old cattle ranches.”
“Which way will the bad guys come?”
“Nevada, they’ll come in from the south. Idaho, from the north.”
“So we can’t stay right here and block the road.”
“They might be down there already.”
One of the buildings was a tiny pinprick of white in a square of green. Froelich’s church, he thought. He opened his door and got out of the car. Walked around to the tailgate and came back with the bird-watcher’s spotting scope. It was like half of a huge pair of binoculars. He steadied it against the open door and put it to his eye.
The optics compressed the view into a flat grainy picture that danced and quivered with his heartbeat. He focused until it was like looking down at the town from a half-mile away. The river was a narrow cut. The bridge was a stone structure. The roads were all dirt. There were more buildings than he had first thought. The church stood alone in a tended acre inside the south angle of the K. It had a stone foundation and the rest of it was clapboard painted white. It would have looked right at home in Massachusetts. Its grounds widened out to the south and were mowed grass studded with headstones.
South of the graveyard was a fence, and behind the fence was a cluster of two-story buildings made of weathered cedar. They were set at random angles to one another. North of the church were more of the same. Houses, stores, barns. Along the short legs of the K were more buildings. Some of them were painted white. They were close together near the center of town, farther apart as the distance increased. The river ran blue and clear, east and north into the sea of grass. There were cars and pickups parked here and there. Some pedestrian activity. It looked like the population might reach a couple of hundred.
“It was a cattle town, I guess,” Neagley said. “They brought the railroad in as far as Casper, through Douglas. They must have driven the herds sixty, seventy miles south and picked it up there.”
“So what do they do now?” Reacher asked.
The town wobbled in the scope as he spoke.
“No idea,” she said. “Maybe they all invest on-line.”
He passed her the scope and she refocused and stared down through it. He watched the lens move fractionally up and down and side to side as she covered the whole area.
“They’ll set up to the south,” she said. “All the preservice activity will happen south of the church. They’ve got a couple of old barns a hundred yards out, and some natural cover.”
“How will they aim to get away?”
The scope moved an eighth of an inch, to the right.
“They’ll expect roadblocks north and south,” she said. “Local cops. That’s a no-brainer. Their badges might get them through, but I wouldn’t be counting on it. This is a whole different situation. There might be confusion, but there won’t be crowds.”
“So how?”
“I know how I’d do it,” she said. “I’d ignore the roads altogether. I’d take off across the grass, due west. Forty miles of open country in some big four-wheel-drive, and you hit the highway. I doubt the Casper PD has got a helicopter. Or the Highway Patrol. There are only two highways in the whole state.”
“Armstrong will come in a helicopter,” Reacher said. “Probably from some Air Force base in Nebraska.”
“But they won’t use his helicopter to chase the bad guys. They’ll be exfiltrating him or taking him to a hospital. I’m sure that’s some kind of standard protocol.”
“Highway Patrol would set up north and south on the highway. They’ll have nearly an hour’s warning.”
Neagley lowered the scope and nodded. “I’d anticipate that. So I’d drive straight across the highway and get back off-road. West of the highway is ten thousand square miles of nothing between Casper and the Wind River Reservation, with only one major road through it. They’d be long gone before somebody whistled up a helicopter and started the search.”
“That’s a bold plan.”
“I’d go for it,” Neagley said.
Reacher smiled. “I know you would. Question is, will these guys? I’m wondering if they’ll take one look and turn around and forget about it.”
“Doesn’t matter. We’ll take them down while they’re looking. We don’t need to catch them in the act.”
Reacher climbed back into the driver’s seat.
“Let’s go to work,” he said.
The bowl was very shallow. They lost maybe a hundred feet of elevation in the twenty miles they drove before they reached the town. The road was hard-packed dirt, smooth as glass, beautifully scraped and contoured. An annual art, Reacher guessed, performed anew every year when the winter snows melted and the spring rains finished. It was the kind of road Model T Fords rolled down in documentary films. It curved as it approached the town so that the bridge could cross the river at an exact right angle.
The bridge seemed to represent the geographic center of town. There was a general store that offered postal service and a breakfast counter. There was a forge set back behind it that had probably fixed ranch machinery way back in history. There was a feed supplier’s office and a hardware store. There was a one-pump gas station with a sign that read: Springs Repaired . There were sidewalks made of wood fronting the buildings. They ran like boat docks, floating on the earth. There was a quiet leathery man loading groceries into a pickup bed.
“They won’t come here,” Reacher said. “This is the most exposed place I’ve ever seen.”
Neagley shook her head. “They won’t know that until they’ve seen it for themselves. They might be in and out in ten minutes, but ten minutes is all we need.”
“Where are we going to stay?”
She pointed. “Over there.”
There was a plain-fronted red cedar building with numerous small windows and a sign that read: Clean Rooms.
“Terrific,” Reacher said.
“Drive around,” Neagley said. “Let’s get a feel for the place.”
A letter K has only four options for exploration, and they had already covered the northern leg on the way in. Reacher backed up to the bridge and struck out north and east, following the river. That road led past eight houses, four on each side, and then narrowed after another half-mile to a poor stony track. There was a barbed-wire fence lost in the grass on the left, and another on the right.
“Ranch land,” Neagley said.
The ranches themselves were clearly miles away. Fragments of the road were visible as it rose and fell over gentle contours into the distance. Reacher turned the truck around and headed back and turned down the short southeast leg. It had more houses and they were closer together, but it was otherwise similar. It narrowed after the same distance and ran on toward nothing visible. There was more barbed wire and an inexplicable wooden shed with no door. Inside the shed was a rusting pickup truck with pale weedy grass growing up all around it. It looked like it had been parked there back when Richard Nixon was Vice President.
“OK, go south,” Neagley said. “Let’s see the church.”
The south leg led seventy miles to Douglas, and they drove the first three miles of it. The town’s power and telephone lines came in from that direction, strung on tarred poles, looping on into the distance, following the road. The road passed the church and the graveyard, then the cluster of cedar buildings, then a couple of abandoned cattle barns, then maybe twenty or thirty small houses, and then the town finished and there was just infinite grassland ahead. But it wasn’t flat. There were crevices and crevasses worn smooth by ten thousand years of winds and weather. They undulated calmly, up and down to maximum depths of ten or twelve feet, like slow ocean s
wells. They were all connected in a network. The grass itself was a yard high, brown and dead and brittle. It swayed in waves under the perpetual breeze.
“You could hide an infantry company in there,” Neagley said.
Reacher turned the car and headed back toward the church. Pulled over and parked level with the graveyard. The church itself was very similar to the one outside Bismarck. It had the same steep roof over the nave and the same blocky square tower. It had a clock on the tower and a weather vane and a flag, and a lightning rod. It was white, but not as bright. Reacher glanced west to the horizon and saw gray clouds massing over the distant mountains.
“It’s going to snow,” he said.
“We can’t see anything from here,” Neagley said.
She was right. The church was built right in the river valley bottom. Its foundation was probably the lowest structure in town. The road to the north was visible for maybe a hundred yards. Same in the south. It ran in both directions and rose over gentle humps and disappeared from sight.
“They could be right on top of us before we know it,” Neagley said. “We need to be able to see them coming.”
Reacher nodded. Opened his door and climbed out of the car. Neagley joined him and they walked toward the church. The air was cold and dry. The graveyard lawn was dead under their feet. It felt like the beginning of winter. There was a new grave site marked out with cotton tape. It lay to the west of the church, in virgin grass on the end of a row of weathered headstones. Reacher detoured to take a look. There were four Froelich graves in a line. Soon to be a fifth, on some sad day in the near future. He looked at the rectangle of tape and imagined the hole dug deep and crisp and square.
Then he stepped away and looked around. There was flat empty land opposite the church on the east side of the road. It was a big enough space to land a helicopter. He stood and imagined it coming in, rotors thumping, turning in the air to face the passenger door toward the church, setting down. He imagined Armstrong climbing out. Crossing the road. Approaching the church. The vicar would probably greet him near the door. He stepped sideways and stood where Armstrong might stand and raised his eyes. Scanned the land to the south and west. Bad news. There was some elevation there, and about a hundred and fifty yards out there were waves and shadows in the moving grass that must mean dips and crevices in the earth beneath it. There were more beyond that distance, all the way out to infinity.
