“So?”
“And I took the precaution of cutting your landline ten miles down the road.”
“Who are you?”
“My name doesn’t matter. I’m a friend of Allen Lamaison’s. That’s all you need to know. You are to extend me the same courtesies that you would extend to him.”
“I don’t extend courtesies to Allen Lamaison,” Reacher said. “So get lost.”
Mahmoud nodded. “Let me put it another way. The threat that Lamaison made is still operative. And today it will benefit me, not him.”
“Threat?” Reacher said.
“Against your daughter.”
Reacher said nothing.
Mahmoud said, “You’re going to show me how to arm Little Wing.”
Reacher glanced at the U-Haul.
“I can’t,” he said. “All you have are the electronics.”
“The missiles are on their way,” Mahmoud said. “They’ll be here very soon.”
“Where are you going to use them?”
“Here and there.”
“Inside the United States?”
“It’s a target-rich environment.”
“Lamaison said Kashmir.”
“We might ship some units to select friends.”
“We?”
“We’re a big organization.”
“I won’t do it.”
“You will. Like you did before. For the same reason.”
Reacher paused a beat and said, “You better come in.”
He stepped aside. Mahmoud was accustomed to deference, so he squeezed past and walked ahead into the hallway. Reacher hit him hard in the back of the head and sent him stumbling toward the living room door, where Frances Neagley stepped out and dropped him with a neat uppercut. A minute later he was hog-tied on the hallway floor with one figure-eight cable tie binding his left wrist to his right ankle and another binding his right wrist to his left ankle. The ties were zipped hard and the flesh around them was already swelling. Mahmoud was bleeding from the mouth and moaning. Reacher kicked him in the side and told him to shut up. Then he stepped back into the living room and waited for the truck from Denver.
The truck from Denver was a white eighteen-wheeler. Its driver was hog-tied next to Mahmoud a minute after climbing down from the cab. Then Reacher dragged Mahmoud out of the house and left him faceup in the sun next to his U-Haul. Mahmoud’s eyes were full of fear. He knew what was heading his way. Reacher figured he would prefer to die, which was why he left him there alive. O’Donnell dragged the driver out and dumped him next to his truck. They all stood for a moment and looked around one last time and then crammed themselves into Neagley’s Civic and headed south, fast. As soon as cell coverage kicked in they stopped and Neagley called her Pentagon buddy. Seven o’clock in the west, ten in the morning in the east. She told the guy where to look and what he would find. Then they drove on. Reacher watched out the back window and before they even hit the mountains he saw a whole squadron of choppers heading west on the horizon. Bell AH-1s, from some nearby Homeland Security base, he assumed. The sky was thick with them.
After the mountains they talked about money. Neagley gave Dixon the financial instruments and the diamonds, and they all agreed she should carry them back to New York and convert them to cash. First call would be to repay Neagley’s expense budget, second call would be to set up trust funds for Angela and Charlie Franz, and Tammy Orozco and her three children, and Sanchez’s friend Milena, and the third call would be to make one last donation to People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, in the name of Tony Swan’s dog, Maisi.
Then it got awkward. Neagley was OK for salary, but Reacher sensed that Dixon and O’Donnell were hurting. Hurting, and tempted, but sensitive about asking. So he went ahead and admitted he was flat broke and suggested they take whatever little margin was left over and divide it up four ways between themselves, as wages. Everyone agreed.
After that, they didn’t talk much at all. Lamaison was gone, Mahmoud was in the system, but no one had come back. And Reacher had gotten around to asking himself the big question: If the stalled car on the 210 had not delayed his arrival at the hospital, would he have performed any better than Dixon or O’Donnell? Than Swan, or Franz, or Sanchez, or Orozco? Maybe the others were asking themselves the same question about him. Truth was, he didn’t know the answer, and he hated not knowing.
Two hours later they were at LAX. They abandoned the Civic in a fire lane and walked away from it, heading for different terminals and different airlines. Before they split up they stood on the sidewalk and bumped fists one last time, and said goodbyes they promised would be temporary. Neagley headed inside to American. Dixon went looking for America West. O’Donnell searched for United. Reacher stood in the heat with anxious people swirling all around him and watched them walk away.
Reacher left California with close to two thousand dollars in his pocket, from the dealers behind the wax museum in Hollywood, and from Saropian in Vegas, and from the two guys at New Age’s place in Highland Park. As a result he didn’t run low on cash for almost four weeks. Finally he stopped by an ATM in the bus depot in Santa Fe, New Mexico. As always he worked out his balance first, and then checked to see if the bank’s calculation matched his own.
For the second time in his life, it didn’t.
The machine told him that the balance in his account was more than a hundred thousand dollars bigger than he was expecting. Exactly a hundred and eleven thousand, eight hundred and twenty-two dollars and eighteen cents bigger, according to his own blind calculation.
111,822.18.
Dixon, obviously. The spoils of war.
At first he was disappointed. Not with the amount. It was more money than he had seen in a long time. He was disappointed with himself, because he couldn’t perceive any message in the number. He was sure Dixon would have adjusted the total by a few dollars or cents one way or the other to give him a wry smile. But he couldn’t get it. It wasn’t prime. No even number greater than two could be prime. It had hundreds of factors. Its reciprocal was boring. Its square root was a long messy string of digits. Its cube root was worse.
111,822.18.
Then he grew disappointed with Dixon. Because the more he thought about it, the more he analyzed it, the more he was sure it really was a boring number.
Dixon’s head wasn’t in the game.
She had let him down.
Maybe.
Or maybe not.
He pressed the button for the mini-statement. A slip of thin paper came out of a slot. Faint gray printing, the last five transactions against his account. Neagley’s original deposit from Chicago was still there, first on the list. Then second, his fifty-dollar withdrawal at the Portland bus depot, up in Oregon. Then third, his airfare from Portland to LAX, way back at the beginning.
Then fourth, a new deposit in the sum of one hundred and one thousand, eight hundred ten dollars, and eighteen cents.
Then fifth, on the same day, another deposit, in the sum of ten thousand and twelve dollars exactly.
101810.18.
10012.
He smiled. Dixon’s head was in the game after all. Totally, completely in the game. The first deposit was 10-18, repeated for emphasis. Military police radio code for mission accomplished, twice over. 10-18, 10-18. Herself and O’Donnell, rescued. Or Lamaison and Mahmoud, beaten. Or both things.
Nice, Karla, he thought.
The second deposit was her zip code: 10012. Greenwich Village. Where she lived. A geographic reference.
A hint.
She had asked: Feel like dropping by New York afterward?
He smiled again and balled up the slip of thin paper and dropped it in the trash. Took a hundred dollars from the machine and headed on inside the depot and bought a ticket for the first bus he saw. He had no idea where it was going.
He had answered: I don’t make plans, Karla.
Nothing To Lose
1
The sun was only half as hot
as he had known sun to be, but it was hot enough to keep him confused and dizzy. He was very weak. He had not eaten for seventy-two hours, or taken water for forty-eight.
Not weak. He was dying, and he knew it.
The images in his mind showed things drifting away. A rowboat caught in a river current, straining against a rotted rope, pulling, tugging, breaking free. His viewpoint was that of a small boy in the boat, sitting low, staring back helplessly at the bank as the dock grew smaller.
Or an airship swinging gently on a breeze, somehow breaking free of its mast, floating up and away, slowly, the boy inside seeing tiny urgent figures on the ground, waving, staring, their faces tilted upward in concern.
Then the images faded, because now words seemed more important than pictures, which was absurd, because he had never been interested in words before. But before he died he wanted to know which words were his. Which applied to him? Was he a man or a boy? He had been described both ways.Be a man, some had said. Others had been insistent:The boy’s not to blame. He was old enough to vote and kill and die, which made him a man. He was too young to drink, even beer, which made him a boy. Was he brave, or a coward? He had been called both things. He had been calledunhinged, disturbed, deranged, unbalanced, delusional, traumatized, all of which he understood and accepted, exceptunhinged. Was he supposed to behinged ? Like a door? Maybe people were doors. Maybe things passed through them. Maybe they banged in the wind. He considered the question for a long moment and then he batted the air in frustration. He was babbling like a teenager in love with weed.
Which is exactly all he had been, a year and a half before.
He fell to his knees. The sand was only half as hot as he had known sand to be, but it was hot enough to ease his chill. He fell facedown, exhausted, finally spent. He knew as certainly as he had ever known anything that if he closed his eyes he would never open them again.
But he was very tired.
So very, very tired.
More tired than a man or a boy had ever been.
He closed his eyes.
2
The line between Hope and Despair was exactly that: a line, in the road, formed where one town’s blacktop finished and the other’s started. Hope’s highway department had used thick dark asphalt rolled smooth. Despair had a smaller municipal budget. That was clear. They had top-dressed a lumpy roadbed with hot tar and dumped gray gravel on it. Where the two surfaces met there was an inch-wide trench of no-man’s-land filled with a black rubbery compound. An expansion joint. A boundary. A line. Jack Reacher stepped over it midstride and kept on walking. He paid it no attention at all.
But he remembered it later. Later, he was able to recall it in great detail.
Hope and Despair were both in Colorado. Reacher was in Colorado because two days previously he had been in Kansas, and Colorado was next to Kansas. He was making his way west and south. He had been in Calais, Maine, and had taken it into his head to cross the continent diagonally, all the way to San Diego in California. Calais was the last major place in the Northeast, San Diego was the last major place in the Southwest. One extreme to the other. The Atlantic to the Pacific, cool and damp to hot and dry. He took buses where there were any and hitched rides where there weren’t. Where he couldn’t find rides, he walked. He had arrived in Hope in the front passenger seat of a bottle-green Mercury Grand Marquis driven by a retired button salesman. He was on his way out of Hope on foot because that morning there had been no traffic heading west toward Despair.
He remembered that fact later, too. And wondered why he hadn’t wondered why.
In terms of his grand diagonal design, he was slightly off course. Ideally he should have been angling directly southwest into New Mexico. But he wasn’t a stickler for plans, and the Grand Marquis had been a comfortable car, and the old guy had been fixed on Hope because he had three grandchildren to see there, before heading onward to Denver to see four more. Reacher had listened patiently to the old guy’s family tales and had figured that a saw-tooth itinerary first west and then south was entirely acceptable. Maybe two sides of a triangle would be more entertaining than one. And then in Hope he had looked at a map and seen Despair seventeen miles farther west and had been unable to resist the detour. Once or twice in his life he had made the same trip metaphorically. Now he figured he should make it for real, since the opportunity was right there in front of him.
He remembered that whim later, too.
The road between the two towns was a straight two-lane. It rose very gently as it headed west. Nothing dramatic. The part of eastern Colorado that Reacher was in was pretty flat. Like Kansas. But the Rockies were visible up ahead, blue and massive and hazy. They looked very close. Then suddenly they didn’t. Reacher breasted a slight rise and stopped dead and understood why one town was called Hope and the other Despair. Settlers and homesteaders struggling west a hundred and fifty years before him would have stopped over in what came to be called Hope and would have seen their last great obstacle seemingly within touching distance. Then after a day’s or a week’s or a month’s repose they would have moved on again and breasted the same slight rise and seen that the Rockies’ apparent proximity had been nothing more than a cruel trick of topography. An optical illusion. A trick of the light. From the top of the rise the great barrier seemed once again remote, even unreachably distant, across hundreds more miles of endless plains. Maybe thousands more miles, although that too was an illusion. Reacher figured that in truth the first significant peaks were about two hundred miles away. A long month’s hard trekking on foot and in mule-drawn carts, across featureless wilderness and along occasional decades-old wheel ruts. Maybe six weeks’ hard trekking, in the wrong season. In context, not a disaster, but certainly a bitter disappointment, a blow hard enough to drive the anxious and the impatient from hope to despair in the time between one glance at the horizon and the next.
Reacher stepped off Despair’s gritty road and walked through crusted sandy earth to a table rock the size of a car. He levered himself up and lay down with his hands behind his head and stared up at the sky. It was pale blue and laced with long high feathery clouds that might once have been vapor trails from coast-to-coast red-eye planes. Back when he smoked he might have lit a cigarette to pass the time. But he didn’t smoke anymore. Smoking implied carrying at least a pack and a book of matches, and Reacher had long ago quit carrying things he didn’t need. There was nothing in his pockets except paper money and an expired passport and an ATM card and a clip-together toothbrush. There was nothing waiting for him anywhere else, either. No storage unit in a distant city, nothing stashed with friends. He owned the things in his pockets and the clothes on his back and the shoes on his feet. That was all, and that was enough. Everything he needed, and nothing he didn’t.
He got to his feet and stood on tiptoe, high on the rock. Behind him to the east was a shallow bowl maybe ten miles in diameter with the town of Hope roughly in its center, eight or nine miles back, maybe ten blocks by six of brick-built buildings and an outlying clutter of houses and farms and barns and other structures made of wood and corrugated metal. Together they made a warm low smudge in the haze. Ahead of him to the west were tens of thousands of flat square miles, completely empty except for ribbons of distant roads and the town of Despair about eight or nine miles ahead. Despair was harder to see than Hope. The haze was thicker in the west. The place looked larger than Hope had been, and teardrop-shaped, with a conventional plains downtown mostly south of the main drag and then a wider zone of activity beyond it, maybe industrial in nature, hence the smog. Despair looked less pleasant than Hope. Cold, where Hope had looked warm; gray, where Hope had been mellow. It looked unwelcoming. For a brief moment Reacher considered backtracking and striking out south from Hope itself, getting back on course, but he dismissed the thought even before it had fully formed. Reacher hated turning back. He liked to press on, dead ahead, whatever. Everyone’s life needed an organizing principle, and relentless forward motion was Reacher’s.
He was angry at himself later, for being so inflexible.
He climbed off the rock and rejoined the road twenty yards west of where he had left it. He stepped up onto the left-hand edge and continued walking, long strides, an easy pace, a little faster than three miles an hour, facing oncoming traffic, the safest way. But there was no oncoming traffic. No traffic in either direction. The road was deserted. No vehicles were using it. No cars, no trucks. Nothing. No chance of a ride. Reacher was a little puzzled, but mostly unconcerned. Many times in his life he had walked a lot more than seventeen miles at a stretch. He raked the hair off his forehead and pulled his shirt loose on his shoulders and kept on going, toward whatever lay ahead.
3
Despair’s downtown area began with a vacant lot where something had been planned maybe twenty years before but never built. Then came an old motor court, shuttered, maybe permanently abandoned. Across the street and fifty yards west was a gas station. Two pumps, both of them old. Not the kind of upright rural antiques Reacher had seen in Edward Hopper’s paintings, but still a couple of generations off the pace. There was a small hut in back with a grimy window full of quarts of oil arrayed in a pyramid. Reacher crossed the apron and stuck his head in the door. It was dark inside the hut and the air smelled of creosote and hot raw wood. There was a guy behind a counter, in worn blue overalls stained black with dirt. He was about thirty, and lean.
“Got coffee?” Reacher asked him.
“This is a gas station,” the guy said.
“Gas stations sell coffee,” Reacher said. “And water, and soda.”
“Not this one,” the guy said. “We sell gas.”
“And oil.”
“If you want it.”
“Is there a coffee shop in town?”
“There’s a restaurant.”
“Just one?”
“One is all we need.”
Reacher ducked back out to the daylight and kept on walking. A hundred yards farther west the road grew sidewalks and according to a sign on a pole changed its name to Main Street. Thirty feet later came the first developed block. It was occupied by a dour brick cube, three stories high, on the left side of the street, to the south. It might once have been a dry goods emporium. It was still some kind of a retail enterprise. Reacher could see three customers and bolts of cloth and plastic household items through its dusty ground-floor windows. Next to it was an identical three-story brick cube, and then another, and another. The downtown area seemed to be about twelve blocks square, bulked mostly to the south of Main Street. Reacher was no kind of an architectural expert, and he knew he was way west of the Mississippi, but the whole place gave him the feel of an old Connecticut factory town, or the Cincinnati riverfront. It was plain, and severe, and unadorned, and out of date. He had seen movies about small-town America in which the sets had been artfully dressed to look a little more perfect and vibrant than reality. This place was the exact opposite. It looked like a designer and a whole team of grips had worked hard to make it dowdier and gloomier than it needed to be. Traffic on the streets was light. Sedans and pick-up trucks were moving slow and lazy. None of them was newer than three years old. There were few pedestrians on the sidewalks.
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