One Shot

The guy nodded again.

Reacher hit him in the mouth. Right-handed, short swing, hard blow.

"Get that fixed," he said.

The guy rocked back a step and doubled over and then came up coughing with blood all over his chin. Cut lips, loose teeth all rimed with red.

"Names," Reacher said. "Now. Or I’ll take you apart a piece at a time."

The guy hesitated. Mistake. Reacher hit him again. Then the guy came up with names, six of them, and descriptions, and an address, all from a position flat on the floor and all in a voice thick and bubbly with mouthfuls of blood.

Reacher glanced at Yanni.

"They all answer," he said.

In the dark in the Mustang on the way back, Ann Yanni said, "He’ll call and warn them."

"He won’t," Reacher said. "He just betrayed them. So my guess is he’ll be going on a long vacation tomorrow."

"You hope."

"Doesn’t matter anyway. They already know I’m coming for them. Another warning wouldn’t make a difference."

"You have a very direct style. One they don’t mention in Journalism 101."

"I could teach you. It’s about surprise, really. If you can surprise them you don’t have to hit them very hard."

Yanni dictated to Franklin the names that John Mistrov had given up. Four of them corresponded with names Reacher had already heard: Charlie Smith, Konstantin Raskin, Vladimir Shumilov, and Pavel Sokolov. The fifth was Grigor Linsky, which Reacher figured had to be the damaged man in the boxy suit, because the sixth name had been given simply as Zec Chelovek.

"I thought you said zec was a word," Franklin said.

"It is," Reacher said. "And so is Chelovek. It’s a transliteration of their word for human being. Zec Chelovek means prisoner-human being. Like Prisoner Man."

"The others aren’t using code names."

"Neither is the Zec, probably. Maybe that’s all he’s got left. Maybe he forgot his real name. Maybe we all would, in the Gulag."

"You sound sorry for him," Yanni said.

"I’m not sorry for him," Reacher said. "I’m just trying to understand him."

"No mention of my father," Helen said.

Reacher nodded. "The Zec is the puppet master. He’s at the top of the tree."

"Which means my father is just an employee."

"Don’t worry about that now. Focus on Rosemary."

Franklin used an online map and figured out that the address John Mistrov had spilled related to a stone-crushing plant built next to a quarry eight miles north and west of the city. Then he searched the tax rolls and confirmed that Specialized Services of Indiana was its registered owner. Then he searched the rolls all over again and found that the only other real estate registered to the trust was a house on the lot adjacent to the stone-crushing plant. Yanni said she knew the area.

"Anything else out there?" Reacher asked her.

She shook her head. "Nothing but farmland for miles."

"OK," Reacher said. "There you go. That’s where Rosemary is."

He checked his watch. Ten o’clock in the evening.

"So what now?" Yanni said.

"Now we wait," Reacher said.

"For what?"

"For Cash to get here from Kentucky. And then we wait some more."

"For what?"

Reacher smiled.

"For the dead of night," he said.

Franklin made coffee. Yanni told TV stories, about people she had known, about things she had seen, about governors’ girlfriends, politicians’ wives’ lovers, rigged ballots, crooked unions, about acres of marijuana growing behind circular screens of tall corn on the edges of Indiana fields. Then Franklin talked about his years as a cop. Then Reacher talked about his years since the army, the wandering, the exploring, his rootless invisible life.

Helen Rodin said nothing at all.

At eleven o’clock exactly they heard the rattle of a big diesel engine beating off the brick outside. Reacher stepped to the window and saw Cash’s Humvee nosing onto the parking apron. Too noisy, he thought. We can’t use it.

Or maybe we can.

"The Marines are here," he said.

They heard Cash’s feet on the outside stairs. Heard his knock on the door. Reacher went out to the hallway to open up. Cash came in, brisk, solid, reassuring. He was dressed all in black. Black canvas pants, black canvas windbreaker. Reacher introduced him all around. Yanni, Franklin, Helen Rodin. Everyone shook hands and Cash took a seat. Inside twenty minutes he was up to speed and totally on board.

"Do we have a plan?" he asked.

"We’re about to make one," Reacher said. Yanni went out to her car for the maps. Franklin cleared away the coffee cups and made space on the table. Yanni chose the right map. Spread it out flat.

"It’s like a giant chessboard out there," she said. "Every square is a field a hundred yards across. There are roads laid out in a grid, north to south, west to east, about twenty fields apart." Then she pointed. Slim finger, painted nail. "But right here we’ve got two roads that meet, and southeast of the corner they make we’ve got an empty space three fields wide and five fields high. No agriculture there. The northern part is the stone-crushing plant and the house is south of it. I’ve seen it and it stands about two hundred yards off the road, all alone in the middle of absolutely nothing. No landscaping, no vegetation. But no fence, either."

"Flat?" Reacher asked.

"As a pool table," Yanni said.

"Dark out there," Cash said.

"As the Earl of Hell’s waistcoat," Reacher said. "And I guess if there’s no fence it means they’re using cameras. With some kind of thermal imaging at night. Some kind of infrared."

"How fast can you run two hundred yards?" Cash asked.

"Me?" Reacher said. "Slow enough they could mail-order a rifle to shoot me with."

"What’s the best approach?"

"Walk in from the north," Reacher said. "Without a doubt. We could get into the stone place straight off the road and just hike through it. Then we could lie up as long as we wanted. Good concealment until the last minute."

"Can’t walk in from anywhere if they’ve got thermal cameras."

"We’ll worry about that later."

"OK, but they’ll anticipate the north."

Reacher nodded. "We’ll pass on the north. Too obvious."

"South or east would be next best. Because presumably the driveway comes in from the west. Probably too straight and too open."

"They’ll be thinking the same thing."

"Makes us both right."

"I kind of like the driveway," Reacher said. "What will it be? Paved?"

"Crushed limestone," Yanni said. "They’ve got plenty to spare."

"Noisy," Cash said.

"It’ll have retained a little daytime heat," Reacher said. "It’ll be warmer than the dirt. It’ll put a stripe of color down their thermal picture. If the contrast isn’t great it’ll give a shadow zone either side."

"Are you kidding?" Cash said. "You’re going to be forty or fifty degrees hotter than ambient temperature. You’re going to show up like a road flare."

"They’re going to be paying attention south and east."

"Not exclusively."

"You got a better idea?"

"What about a full frontal assault? With vehicles?"

Reacher smiled. "If it absolutely positively has to be destroyed by morning, call the United States Marine Corps."