The Hard Way

CHAPTER 69

THE DAYLIGHT LASTED until a little after eight o’clock. By then Reacher was in the Land Rover and Kate Lane was in the Mini. The sky darkened in the east and reddened in the west. Twilight rolled in fast, and with it came an evening mist that looked picturesque but cut visibility to less than a hundred yards. The bird scarer fell silent. All afternoon and into the evening it had been firing at unpredictable random intervals between a minimum of fifteen and a maximum of forty minutes. Now its sudden silence was more noticeable than its noise.

Taylor and Jackson were in one of the barns, working on the backhoe. Pauling was in the kitchen, opening cans for dinner. Jade was still at the table, drawing.

By eight-thirty visibility was so marginal that Reacher slid out of the Land Rover and headed for the kitchen. He met Jackson on the way. Jackson was coming back from the barn. His hands were covered with grease and oil.

Reacher asked, “How’s it going?”

“It’ll be ready,” Jackson said.

Then Taylor appeared out of the gloom.

“Ten hours to go,” he said. “We’re safe until dawn.”

“You sure?” Reacher said.

“Not really.”

“Me either.”

“So what does the U.S. Army field manual say about nighttime perimeter security?”

Reacher smiled. “It says you put a shitload of Claymores about a hundred yards out. If you hear one go off you know you just killed an intruder.”

“What if you don’t have any Claymores?”

“Then you hide.”

“That’s the SAS way. But we can’t hide the house.”

“We could take Kate and Jade someplace else.”

Taylor shook his head. “Better if they stay. I don’t want my focus split.”

“How do they feel about that?”

“Ask them.”

So Reacher did. He took a shortcut through the house and went out to the Mini. Told Kate to take a break for dinner. Then he offered to drive her and Jade anyplace she wanted to go, a hotel, a resort, a spa, Norwich, Birmingham, London, anywhere. She refused. She said as long as Lane was alive she wanted Taylor close by with a gun. She said a farmhouse with stone walls three feet thick was the best place she could think of to be. Reacher didn’t argue with her. Privately he agreed with Taylor. Split focus was a bad thing. And it was possible that Lane’s guys already had covert surveillance going. Maybe even likely. If so, they would have the roads covered. They would be watching cars pass by. Looking for Taylor, primarily. But if they were given the chance to see that what was supposed to be Susan and Melody Jackson was actually Kate and Jade Lane, then the whole game would change.

Dinner was a random mixture of canned stuff that Pauling had found in cupboards. She wasn’t much of a cook. She was too accustomed to dialing her Barrow Street telephone and calling out for whatever she wanted. But nobody seemed to mind. Nobody was in the mood for a gourmet menu. They planned as they ate. Agreed to set up two two-person watches, sequential, five hours each. That would take them through until dawn. One person would patrol the blind gable wall to the south, and one would do the same thing to the north. Each would be armed with a loaded G-36. The first watch would be Taylor and Jackson, and at half past one in the morning Reacher and Pauling would take over. Kate Lane would sit it out. The possibility that a hostile nighttime reconnaissance probe might identify her was too much of a risk.

Reacher cleared the table and washed the dishes and Taylor and Jackson went outside with their G-36s cocked and locked. Kate went upstairs to put Jade to bed. Pauling put logs on the fire. Watched Reacher at the sink.

“You OK?” she asked him.

“I’ve done KP before.”

“I didn’t mean that.”

He said, “We’ve got an SAS guy on one end of the house and a Parachute Regiment guy on the other. They’ve both got automatic weapons. And they’re both personally motivated. They won’t fall asleep.”

“I didn’t mean that, either. I meant with the whole thing.”

“I told you we wouldn’t be putting anybody on trial.”

Pauling nodded.

“She’s cute,” she said. “Isn’t she?”

“Who?”

“Kate. She makes me feel ancient.”

“Older women,” Reacher said. “Good for something.”

“Thanks.”

“I mean it. Give me a choice, I’d go home with you, not her.”

“Why?”

“Because I’m weird like that.”

“I’m supposed to put people on trial.”

“So was I, once. But I’m not going to this time. And I’m OK with that.”

“Me too. That’s what’s bothering me.”

“You’ll get over it. The backhoe and a plane ticket will help.”

“Distance? Six feet of earth and three thousand air miles?”

“Works every time.”

“Does it? Really?”

“We splattered a thousand bugs on our windshield yesterday. A thousand more today. One extra won’t make any difference.”

“Lane isn’t a bug.”

“No, he’s worse.”

“What about the others?”

“They’ve got a choice. The purest kind of choice there is. They can stay or they can go. Entirely up to them.”

“Where do you think they are now?”

“Somewhere out there,” Reacher said.

A half-hour later Kate Lane came downstairs again. The tails of her borrowed shirt were tied at her waist and the sleeves were rolled to her elbows.

“Jade’s asleep,” she said. She turned sideways to squeeze past a displaced dining chair and Reacher figured it was possible to see that she was pregnant. Just. Now that he had been told.

He asked, “Is she doing OK?”

“Better than we could have hoped,” Kate said. “She’s not sleeping great. The jet lag has screwed her up. And she’s a little nervous, I guess. And she doesn’t understand why there are no animals here. She doesn’t understand arable farming. She thinks we’re hiding a whole bunch of cute little creatures from her.”

“Does she know about the new brother or sister or whatever it’s going to be?”

Kate nodded. “We waited until we were on the plane. We tried to make it all part of the adventure.”

“How was it at the airport?”

“No problem. The passports were fine. They looked at the names more than the pictures. To make sure they matched the tickets.”

Pauling said, “So much for Homeland Security.”

Kate nodded again. “We got the idea from something we read in the newspaper. Some guy left on a short-notice business trip, grabbed his passport from the drawer, and he’d been through six separate countries before he realized it was his wife’s passport that he had grabbed.”

Reacher said, “Tell me how the whole thing went down.”

“It was pretty easy, really. We did stuff in advance. Bought the voice machine, rented the room, got the chair, took the car keys.”

“Taylor did most of that, right?”

“He said people would remember me more than him.”

“He was probably right.”

“But I had to buy the voice machine. Too weird if a guy who couldn’t talk wanted one.”

“I guess.”

“Then I copied the photograph at Staples. That was tough. I had to let Groom drive me. It would have been too suspicious to insist on Graham all the time. But after that it was easy. We left for Bloomingdale’s that morning and went straight to Graham’s apartment instead. Just holed up there and waited. We kept really quiet in case anyone checked with the neighbors. We kept the lights off and covered the windows in case anyone passed by on the street. Then later we started the phone calls. Right from the apartment. I was very nervous at first.”

“You forgot to say no cops.”

“I know. I thought I’d blown it immediately. But Edward didn’t seem to notice. Then it got much easier later. With practice.”

“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.