Bad Luck and Trouble

"Nine hours," Neagley said.

"Another hundred and thirty thousand square miles," Dixon said.

A hundred thirty-three thousand five hundred thirty-five, Reacher thought, automatically. The increase alone was as big as most of California and more than half of Texas. The area of a circle was equal to pi times the radius squared, and it was the squared part that made it increase so fast.

"They’re coming here," he said. "They have to be."

Nobody answered.

Dean led them inside. His house was a long low shack built from concrete and timber. The concrete had been left raw and was fading to a yellowed patina. The timber was stained dark brown. There was a big living room with Navajo rugs and worn furniture and a fireplace heaped with last winter’s ash. There were plenty of books in the room. CDs were piled everywhere. There was a stereo with vacuum tube amplifiers and horn speakers. Altogether the place looked exactly like a city refugee’s dream.

Dean went to make coffee in the kitchen and Dixon said, "Nine hours twenty-six minutes." Neagley and O’Donnell didn’t get the point, but Reacher did. Assuming three decimal places for pi and a speed of fifty for the truck, then nine hours and twenty-six minutes made the potential search area exactly seven hundred thousand square miles.

"Mahmoud is cautious," Reacher said. "He’s not going to buy a pig in a poke. Either it’s his money and he doesn’t want to waste it, or it’s someone else’s money and he doesn’t want to get his head cut off for screwing up. He’s coming."

"Dean says not."

"Dean says he wasn’t told in advance. There’s a difference."

Dean came back and served the coffee and nobody spoke for a quarter of an hour. Then Reacher turned to Dean and asked, "Did you do your own electrical work here?"

Dean said, "Some of it."

"Got any plastic cable ties?"

"Lots of them. Workshop out back."

"You should drive north," Reacher said. "Head for Palmdale, get some breakfast."

"Now?"

"Now. Stay for lunch. Don’t come back until the afternoon."

"Why? What’s going to happen here?"

"I’m not sure yet. But whatever, you shouldn’t be around."

Dean sat still for a moment. Then he got up and found his keys and left. They heard his car start up. Heard the crunch of power steering on gravel. Then the noise faded to nothing and the house went quiet again.

Dixon said, "Nine hours forty-six minutes." Reacher nodded. The circle was now three-quarters of a million square miles in size.

"He’s coming," Reacher said.

The circle reached a million square miles at seventeen minutes past one in the morning. Reacher found an atlas in a bookcase and traced a likely route and worked out that Denver was eighteen hours away, which made six in the morning a likely rendezvous time. Ideal, from Mahmoud’s point of view. Lamaison would have told him about the threat against the daughter, and he would figure under any circumstances the kid would be home at six in the morning. And therefore a perfect reminder of Dean’s vulnerability. Maybe Mahmoud was dropping by unannounced, but there was no doubt he expected to get what he wanted.

Reacher got up and went for a stroll, first outside, and then inside. The property consisted of the house and a garage block and the workshop that Dean had mentioned. Beyond that, there was nothing. It was pitch dark but Reacher could feel vast silent emptiness all around. Inside, the house was simple. Three bedrooms, a den, a kitchen, the living room. One of the bedrooms was the daughter’s. There were inkjet prints of photographs pinned up on a board. Groups of teenage girls, three or four at a time. The kid and her friends, presumably. By a process of elimination Reacher worked out which girl appeared in every picture. Dean’s daughter, he assumed. Her camera, her room. She was a tall blonde girl, maybe fourteen, still a little awkward, braces on her teeth. But a year or two into the future she was going to be spectacular, and she was going to stay that way for thirty years. A hostage to fortune. Reacher understood Dean’s distress, and wished Lamaison had screamed a little more on the way down.

People say the darkest hour is just before dawn, but people are wrong. By definition the darkest hour is in the middle of the night. By five in the morning the sky in the east was lightening. By five-thirty visibility was pretty good. Reacher took another walk. Dean had no neighbors. He was living in the middle of thousands of empty acres. The view was clear to every horizon. Worthless, sunblasted land. The power lines ran south to north and disappeared in the haze. A stony driveway came in from the southeast. It was at least a mile long, maybe more. Reacher walked a little ways down it and turned around and checked what Mahmoud would see when he arrived. The helicopter was out of sight. By chance a lone mesquite bush blocked the rotor crown from view. Reacher moved Neagley’s Civic behind the garage block and checked again. Perfect. A somnolent group of three buildings, low and dusty, almost part of the landscape. A hundred yards out he saw a flat broken fragment of rock the size and shape of a coffin. He walked over there and took Tony Swan’s lump of concrete out of his pocket and rested it on the slab, like a monument. He walked back and ducked into the workshop. The door was unlocked. The place was laid out neatly and smelled of machine oil heated by the sun. He found a tray of black plastic cable ties and took eight of the biggest. They were about two feet long, thick and stiff. For strapping heavy cable into perforated conduit boxes.

Then he went back inside the house to wait.

Six o’clock arrived, and Mahmoud didn’t. Now the circle measured more than two and a half million square miles. Six-fifteen came and went, two-point-six million square miles. Six-thirty, two-point-seven million.

Then, at exactly six thirty-two, the telephone bell dinged, just once, brief and soft and muted.

"Here we go," Reacher said. "Someone just cut the phone line."

They moved to the windows. They waited. Then five miles south and east they saw a tiny white dot winking in the early sun. A vehicle, closing fast, trailing a cloud of khaki dust that was backlit by the dawn like a halo.

85

They moved away from the windows and waited in the living room, tense and silent. Five minutes later they heard the crunch of stones under tires and the wet muffled beat of a worn Detroit V-8. The crunching stopped and the engine died and they heard a parking brake ratchet on. A minute after that they heard a tinny door slam and the sound of random footsteps on gravel. The driver, stumbling around, yawning and stretching.

A minute after that, they heard a knock at the door.

Reacher waited.

The knock came again.

Reacher counted to twenty and walked down the hall. Opened the door. Saw a man standing on the step, framed against the light, with a mid-sized panel truck parked behind him. The truck was a rented U-Haul, white and red, top-heavy, a little ungainly. Reacher felt like he had seen it before. He had never seen the man before. He was medium height, medium weight, expensively dressed but a little rumpled. He was maybe forty years old. He had thick black hair, shiny, beautifully cut, and the kind of mid-brown skin and regular features that could have made him Indian, or Pakistani, or Iranian, or Syrian, or Lebanese, or Algerian, or even Israeli or Italian.

In turn Azhari Mahmoud saw a disheveled giant of a white man. Two meters tall, easily, a hundred and ten kilos, maybe a hundred and twenty, shaved head, wrists as wide and hard as two-by-fours, hands like shovels, dressed in dusty gray denims and work boots. A crazy scientist, he thought. Right at home in a desert shack.