by Lee Child
“I was in the car with Burke. You sounded great by then.”
“I thought there was someone with him. There was something in his voice. And he kept narrating where he was. He was telling you, I guess. You must have been hidden.”
“You asked for his name in case you slipped and used it anyway.”
Kate nodded. “I knew who it was, obviously. And I thought it might sound dominating.”
“You know Greenwich Village pretty well.”
“I lived there before I married Edward.”
“Why did you split the demands into three parts?”
“Because to ask for it all at once would have been too much of a clue. We thought we better let the stress build up a little. Then maybe Edward would miss the connection.”
“I don’t think he missed it. But I think he misinterpreted it. He started thinking about Hobart and the Africa connection.”
“How bad is Hobart, really?”
“About as bad as it gets.”
“That’s unforgivable.”
“No argument from me.”
“Do you think I’m cold-blooded?”
“If I did it wouldn’t be a criticism.”
“Edward wanted to own me. Like a chattel. And he said if I was ever unfaithful he would rupture Jade’s hymen with a potato peeler. He said he would tie me up and make me watch him do it. He said that when she was five years old.”
Reacher said nothing.
Kate turned to Pauling and asked, “Do you have children?”
Pauling shook her head.
Kate said, “You blot a thing like that right out of your mind. You assume it was just the sick product of a temporary rage. Like he wasn’t quite right in the head. But then I heard the story about Anne and I knew he was capable of really doing it. So now I want him dead.”
Reacher said, “He’s going to be. Very soon.”
“They say you should never get between a lioness and her cub. I never really understood that before. Now I do. There are no limits.”
The room went as quiet as only the countryside can. The flames in the fireplace flickered and danced. Strange shadows moved on the walls.
Reacher asked, “Are you planning on staying here forever?”
“I hope to,” Kate said. “Organic farming is going to be a big thing. Better for people, better for the land. We can buy some more acres from the locals. Maybe expand a little.”
“We?”
“I feel like a part of it.”
“What are you growing?”
“Right now, just grass. We’re in the hay business for the next five years or so. We have to work the old chemicals out of the soil. And that takes time.”
“Hard to picture you as a farmer.”
“I think I’m going to enjoy it.”
“Even when Lane is out of the picture permanently?”
“In that case I guess we would go back to New York occasionally. But downtown only. I won’t go back to the Dakota.”
“Anne’s sister lives directly opposite. In the Majestic. She’s been watching Lane every day for four years.”
Kate said, “I’d like to meet her. And I’d like to see Hobart’s sister again.”
“Like a survivors’ club,” Pauling said.
Reacher got out of his chair and walked to the window. Saw nothing but nighttime blackness. Heard nothing but silence.
“First we have to survive,” he said.
They kept the fire going and dozed quietly in the armchairs. When the clock in Reacher’s head hit one-thirty in the morning he tapped Pauling on the knee and stood up and stretched. Then they headed outside together into the dead-of-night dark and cold. Called softly and met Taylor and Jackson in a huddle outside the front door. Reacher took Taylor’s weapon and headed for the south end of the house. The gun was warm from Taylor’s hands. The safety was above and behind the trigger. It had tritium markings, which made them faintly luminous. Reacher selected single fire and raised the rifle to his shoulder and checked the fit. It felt pretty good. It balanced pretty well. The carrying handle was like an exaggerated version of an M16’s, with a neat little oval aperture in the front slope to provide a line-of-sight back to the built-in scope, which was a plain 3x monocular, which according to the laws of optics pulled the target three times closer than the naked eye but also made it three stops darker, which rendered it functionally useless at night. Three stops darker than pitch black was no use to anyone. But overall the thing was a handsome weapon. It would be fine by dawn.
He put his back against the blind gable wall and settled in and waited. He could smell woodsmoke from the kitchen chimney. After a minute his eyesight adjusted and he saw that there was a little moonlight behind heavy cloud, maybe one shade lighter than total darkness. But still comforting. Nobody would see him from a distance. He was wearing gray pants and a gray jacket and he was leaning on a gray wall holding a black gun. In turn he would see headlights miles away and he would see men on foot about ten feet away. Close quarters. But at night, vision was not the sense that counted anyway. In the darkness, hearing was primary. Sound was the best early-warning system. Reacher himself could be totally silent, because he wasn’t moving. But no intruder could be. Intruders had to move.
He stepped forward two paces and stood still. Turned his head slowly left and right and scoped out a two-hundred-degree arc all around him, like a huge curved bubble of space from which he had to be aware of every sound. Assuming that Pauling was doing the same thing north of the house they had every angle of approach covered between them. At first he heard nothing. Just an absolute absence of sound. Like a vacuum. Like he was deaf. Then as he relaxed and concentrated he started to pick up tiny imperceptible sounds drifting in across the flat land. The thrill of faint breezes in distant trees. The hum of power lines a mile away. The soak of water turning earth to mud in ditches. Grains of dirt drying and falling into furrows. Field mice, in burrows. Things growing. He turned his head left and right like radar and knew that any human approach might as well be accompanied by a marching band. He would hear it clearly a hundred yards away, however quiet anyone tried to be.
Reacher, alone in the dark. Armed and dangerous. Invincible.
He stood in the same spot for five straight hours. It was cold, but bearable. Nobody came. By six-thirty in the morning the sun was showing far away to his left. There was a bright horizontal band of pink in the sky. A thick horizontal blanket of mist on the ground. Gray visibility was spreading westward slowly, like an ebb tide.
The dawn of a new day.
The time of maximum danger.
Taylor and Jackson came out of the house carrying the third and fourth rifles. Reacher didn’t speak. Just took up a new station against the rear façade of the house, his shoulder against the corner, facing south. Taylor mirrored his position against the front wall. Reacher knew without looking that sixty feet behind them Jackson and Pauling were doing the same thing. Four weapons, four pairs of eyes, all trained outward.
Reasonable security.
For as long as they could bear to stay in position.
CHAPTER 70
They stayed in position all day long. All through the morning and all through the afternoon and well into the evening. Fourteen straight hours.
Lane didn’t come.
One at a time they took short meal breaks and shorter bathroom breaks. They rotated stations clockwise around the house for variety. Their eight-pound rifles started to feel like eight tons in their hands. Jackson slipped away for a minute and turned the bird scarer back on. Thereafter the stillness was periodically shattered by loud random shotgun blasts. Even though they knew for sure they were due each sentry jumped and ducked each time they arrived.
Lane didn’t come.
Kate and Jade stayed in the house, out of sight. They made food and poured drinks and carried them on trays to the windows and the doors, tea for Taylor and Jackson, coffee for Reacher, orange juice for Pauling. The sun burned through the mist and the day g
rew warm, and then it grew cold again in the late afternoon.
Lane didn’t come.
Jade drew pictures. Every twenty minutes or so she would bring a new one to a different window and ask for an opinion concerning its merit. When it was his turn to judge, Reacher would duck his head down and give the paper a look. Then he would turn back to the outward view and talk out of the side of his mouth. Very good, he would say. And generally the pictures merited the praise. The kid wasn’t a bad little artist. She had switched from future predictions to straightforward reportage. She drew the red Mini Cooper, she drew Pauling with her gun, she drew Taylor with a mouth like a wrecked Buick’s grille. She drew Reacher, huge, taller than the house. Then late in the day she switched from reportage to fantasy and drew farm animals in the barns, even though she had been told that the Jacksons didn’t have any, not even a dog.
Lane didn’t come.
Kate fixed sandwiches for an early dinner and Jade took to visiting the corner windows and asking everyone in turn if she could come outside and explore. Everyone in turn said no, she had to hide. On the third go-round Reacher heard her modify her request and ask Taylor if she could come out after dark, and he heard Taylor say maybe, like worn-down parents everywhere.
Lane didn’t come.
By eight-thirty in the evening visibility had died away to nothing again and Reacher had been on his feet for nineteen hours. Pauling too. Taylor and Jackson had done twenty-four, spelled only by a five-hour break. They all met in a loose huddle in the gathering gloom by the front door, shaky with fatigue, frustrated, made anxious by fruitless vigilance.
Taylor said, “He’s waiting us out.”
“Therefore he’s going to win,” Jackson said. “We can’t keep this up much longer.”
“He’s had twenty-seven hours,” Pauling said. “We have to assume he’s armed by now.”
“He’ll come tomorrow at dawn,” Taylor said.
“You sure?” Reacher asked.
“Not really.”
“Me either. Three or four in the morning would work just as well.”
“Too dark.”
“If they’ve bought guns they could have bought night vision, too.”
“How would you do it?”
“Three guys loop around and walk in from the north. The other four come up the driveway, maybe two in a car, lights off, high speed, with the other two flanking it on foot. Two directions, seven guys, their choice of seven windows, we couldn’t stop at least three of them getting inside. They’d get you or a hostage before we could react.”
“You’re a real ray of sunshine,” Taylor said.
“I’m just trying to think like them.”
“We’d get them before they got anywhere near the house.”
“Only if all four of us can stay awake and alert for the next eight hours. Or the next thirty-two hours, if he delays another day. Or the next fifty-six hours, if he delays two days. Which he might. He’s in no hurry. And he’s not dumb. If he’s decided to wait us out, why not do it properly?”
Taylor said, “We’re not moving. This place is a stronghold.”
“Three-dimensionally it’s fine,” Reacher said. “But battles are fought in four dimensions, not three. Length, breadth, and height, plus time. And time is on Lane’s side, not ours. This is a siege now. We’re going to run out of food, and sooner or later all four of us are going to be asleep at the same time.”
“So we’ll halve the guard. One man north, one man south, the other two resting but ready.”
Reacher shook his head. “No, it’s time to get aggressive.”
“How?”
“I’m going to go find them. They’ve got to be holed up somewhere close. It’s time to pay them a visit. They won’t be expecting that.”
“Alone?” Pauling said. “That’s insane.”
“I have to anyway,” Reacher said. “I didn’t get Hobart’s money yet. There’s eight hundred grand out there. Can’t let it go to waste.”
Taylor and Pauling stayed on guard and Reacher fetched the big Ordnance Survey map from the Mini’s glove box. He took Jade’s latest drawings off the kitchen table and piled them on a chair and spread out the map in their place. Then he went over it with Jackson. Jackson had a year’s worth of local knowledge, which was less than Reacher would have liked, but it was better than nothing. The map clarified most of the terrain issues all by itself with its faint orange contour lines, which were very widely spaced and which curved only gently. Flat land, probably the flattest in the British Isles. Like a pool table. Grange Farm and Bishops Pargeter were roughly in the center of a wide triangle of empty space bounded to the east by the road that ran south from Norwich to Ipswich in Suffolk and to the west by the Thetford road that Reacher and Pauling had driven three times already. Elsewhere in the triangle were meandering minor tracks and isolated farm settlements. Here and there chance and history had nestled small communities in the angles of crossroads. They were shown on the map as tiny gray squares and rectangles. Some of the rectangles represented short rows of houses. Some of the larger buildings were shown individually. The only one within any kind of a reasonable distance from Bishops Pargeter and labeled PH was the Bishop’s Arms.
This is the only pub for miles, lad, the farmer at the bar had said. Why else do you think it’s so crowded?
“Are they there, do you think?” Reacher asked.
Jackson said, “If they stopped in Fenchurch Saint Mary first and then aimed for Bishops Pargeter afterward, then that’s the only place they could have passed. But they could have gone north. Nearer Norwich there are a lot of places.”
“Can’t buy guns in Norwich,” Reacher said. “Not if you had to call Holland.”
“Shotguns up there,” Jackson said. “Nothing heavier.”
“So they probably didn’t go there,” Reacher said. He recalled the motoring atlas. The city of Norwich had been shown as a dense stain in the top-right corner of the bulge that was East Anglia. The end of the line. Not on the way to anyplace else.
“I think they stayed close,” he said.
“Then the Bishop’s Arms could be it,” Jackson said.
Five miles, Reacher thought. On foot, that’s a three-hour round trip. Back by midnight.
“I’m going to check it out,” he said.
He detoured via the mud room and collected two spare magazines for his G-36. Found Pauling’s purse in the kitchen and borrowed her little Maglite. Folded the map and put it in his pocket. Then he huddled with the others in the dark outside the front door and agreed on a password. He didn’t want to get shot at when he arrived back. Jackson suggested Canaries, which was the Norwich soccer team’s nickname, for its yellow uniforms.
“Are they any good?” Reacher asked.
“They used to be,” Jackson said. “Twenty-some years ago, they were great.”
Them and me both, Reacher thought.
“Take care,” Pauling said, and kissed him on the cheek.
“I’ll be back,” he said.
He started by walking north behind the house. Then he turned west, staying parallel to the road, about a field’s width away. There was a little leftover twilight in the sky. Just the last remnant. Torn and ragged clouds with pale stars beyond. The air was cold and a little damp. There was a knee-high blanket of thin mist clinging to the earth. The dirt was soft and heavy underfoot. He carried his G-36 by its handle, left-handed, ready to swing it up into position when needed.
Reacher, alone in the dark.
The Grange Farm boundary was a trench ten feet across with a muddy bottom six feet down. Drainage, for the flat land. Not exactly canals like in Holland, but not anything easily cleared, either. Not anything to just step across. Reacher had to slide down the near bank, struggle through the mud, and then climb up the far bank again. A mile into the trip his pants were a real mess. And he was going to have to invest some serious shoeshine time on the trip home. Or else deduct the price of a new pair of Cheaneys from Hobart’s compensa
tion. Maybe he could detour to the source. The motoring atlas had shown Northampton about forty miles west of Cambridge. Maybe he could talk Pauling into a two-hour shopping expedition. He had let her insist on Macy’s after all.
Two miles into the trip he was very tired. And slow. Behind schedule. He changed course and moved slightly south and west. Came closer to the road. Found a tractor route through the next farmer’s fields. Huge tires had beaten the earth into hard ruts either side of a grassy center hump. He wiped his shoes on the grass and sped up a little. Found that the next ditch was crossed by an improvised trestle made of old railroad ties. Strong enough for a tractor, strong enough for him. He followed the tire tracks until they turned abruptly north. Then he struck off through the fields again on his own.
After four miles the clock in his head told him that it was ten-thirty at night. Twilight had gone completely but the rags of cloud had cleared a little and the moon was bright. The stars were out. Far away to his left he could see occasional cars passing by on the road. Three had gone west and two had gone east. Bright lights, sedate speeds. Theoretically the two heading east could have been Lane’s guys, but he doubted it. Ten and eleven in the evening was no kind of a time to attack. He guessed rural roads saw a minor traffic peak right around then. Pubs letting out, friends going home. Too many witnesses. If he knew it, then Lane knew it, too. Certainly Gregory knew it.
He kept on going. The spare magazines in his pocket were bruising his hip. Five minutes before eleven o’clock he spotted the glow from the pub’s sign. Just an electric brightness in the misty air, because the sign itself was hidden by the bulk of the building. He could smell woodsmoke from a chimney. He looped around toward the light and the smell, staying well to the north of the road, just in case Lane had watchers out. He kept to the fields until he was facing the back of the building from four hundred yards away. He saw small squares of harsh white fluorescent light. Windows. Undraped and unglamorous. Therefore kitchens and bathrooms, he guessed. Therefore frosted or pebbled glass. No view out.
