The Hard Way

“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 co

“I don’t think he missed it. But I think he misinterpreted it. He started thinking about Hobart and the Africa co

“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 A

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 pla

“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.”

“A

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.