The Hard Way (Page 67)

"And you think Taylor brought them here to England?"

"I think Kate wanted him to. Maybe even begged him to. They needed a safe haven. Somewhere very distant. Out of Lane’s reach. And they were having an affair. They didn’t want to be apart. So if Taylor’s here, then Kate’s here, too. Jade did a picture of three people in an airplane. That was the journey she was going to take. Then she did one of two families together. Like double vision. I had no idea what it meant. But now my guess is that was Jackson and Taylor, and Susan and Kate, and Melody and herself. Her new situation. Her new extended family. Happy ever after on Grange Farm."

"Doesn’t work," Pauling said. "Their passports were still in the drawer."

"That was crude," Reacher said. "Wasn’t it? You must have searched a thousand desks. Did you ever see passports all alone in a drawer? Kind of ostentatiously displayed like that? I never did. They were always buried under other junk. Leaving them on show like that was a message. It said, hey, we’re still in the country. Which meant actually they weren’t."

"How do you get out without a passport?"

"You don’t. But you once said, they don’t look as closely on the way out. You said sometimes a little resemblance is all you need."

Pauling paused a beat. "Someone else’s passport?"

"Who do we know that fits the bill? A woman in her thirties and an eight-year-old girl?"

Pauling said, "Susan and Melody."

"Dave Kemp told us Jackson had been alone at the farm," Reacher said. "That was because Susan and Melody had flown to the States. They got all the correct entry stamps. Then they gave their passports to Kate and Jade. Maybe in Taylor’s apartment. Maybe over dinner. Like a little ceremony. Then Taylor booked on British Airways. He was sitting next to a British woman on the plane. We know that for sure. A buck gets ten she’s on the passenger manifest as Mrs. Susan Jackson. And another buck gets ten that next to her was a little British kid called Ms. Melody Jackson. But they were really Kate and Jade Lane."

"But that leaves Susan and Melody stuck in the States."

"Temporarily," Reacher said. "What did Taylor mail back?"

"A thin book. Not many pages. With a rubber band around it."

"Who puts a rubber band around a thin book? It was actually two very thin books. Two passports, bundled together. Mailed to Susan’s New York City hotel room, where she and Melody are right now sitting and waiting to get them back."

"But the stamps will be out of sequence now. When they leave they’ll be exiting without having entered."

Reacher nodded. "It’s an irregularity. But what are the people at JFK going to do about it? Deport them? That’s exactly what they want. So they’ll get home OK."

"Sisters," Pauling said. "This whole thing has been about the loyalty of sisters. Patti Joseph, Dee Marie Graziano, Susan Jackson."

Reacher drove on. Said nothing.

"Unbelievable," Pauling said. "We saw Kate and Jade this morning."

"Setting out with their hoes," Reacher said. "Starting out on their new lives."

Then he accelerated a little, because the road was widening and straightening for the bypass around the town called Thetford.

John Gregory was hitting the gas, too. He was at the wheel of a rented dark green seven-seat Toyota Land Cruiser sports utility vehicle. Edward Lane was next to him in the front passenger seat. Kowalski and Addison and Carter Groom were shoulder to shoulder on the rear bench. Burke and Perez were on the jump seats way in back. They were joining the M-11 at its southern tip, having blasted straight through central London to the northeast corner of the inner city.

Chapter 65

THIS TIME IN full daylight Reacher saw the sign to B’sh’ps P’ter a hundred yards away and slowed well in advance and made the turn like he had been driving the back roads of Norfolk all his life. It was close to two o’clock in the afternoon. The sun was high and the wind was dropping. Blue skies, small white clouds, green fields. A perfect English late-summer day. Almost.

Pauling said, "What are you going to tell them?"

"That I’m sorry," Reacher said. "I think that might be the best place to start."

"Then what?"

"Then I’ll probably say it again."

"They can’t stay there."

"It’s a farm. Someone’s got to stay there."

"Are you volunteering?"

"I might have to."

"Do you know anything about farming?"

"Only what I’ve seen in the movies. Usually they get locusts. Or a fire."

"Not here. Floods, maybe."

"And idiots like me."

"Don’t beat yourself up. They faked a kidnap. Don’t blame yourself for taking it seriously."

"I should have seen it," Reacher said. "It was weird from the start."

They passed the Bishop’s Arms. The pub. The end of the lunch hour. Five cars in the lot. The Grange Farm Land Rover was not one of them. They drove on, roughly east, and in the distance they saw the Bishops Pargeter church tower, gray, square, and squat. Only forty-some feet tall, but it dominated the flat landscape like the Empire State Building. They drove on. They passed the ditch that marked Grange Farm’s western boundary. Heard the bird scarer again, a loud booming shotgun blast.

"I hate that thing," Pauling said.

Reacher said, "You might end up loving it. Camouflage like that could be our best friend."

"Could be Taylor’s best friend, too. In about sixty seconds from now. He’s going to think he’s under attack."

Reacher nodded.

"Take a deep breath," he said.

He slowed the car well before the small flat bridge. Turned in wide and deliberate. Left it in second gear. Small vehicle, low speed. Unthreatening. He hoped.

The driveway was long and it looped through two curves. Around unseen softness in the dirt, maybe. The beaten earth was muddy and less even than it had looked from a distance. The tiny car rocked and bounced. The farmhouse’s gable wall was blank. No windows. The smoke from the chimney was thicker now and straighter. Less wind. Reacher opened his window and heard nothing at all except the noise of his engine and the slow rolling crunch of his tires on gravel and small stones.

"Where is everybody?" Pauling said. "Still out hoeing?"

"You can’t hoe for seven hours straight," Reacher said. "You’d break your back."

The driveway split thirty yards in front of the house. A fork in the road. West, the formal approach to the front door. East, a shabbier track toward the spot where the Land Rover had been parked, and the barns beyond. Reacher went east. The Land Rover wasn’t there anymore. All the barn doors were closed. The whole place was quiet. Nothing was moving.

Reacher braked gently and backed up. Took the wider path west. There was a gravel circle with a stunted ash tree planted at its center. Around the tree was a circular wooden bench way too big for the thin trunk. Either the tree was a replacement or the carpenter had been thinking a hundred years ahead. Reacher drove around the circle clockwise, the British way. Stopped ten feet from the front door. It was closed. Nothing was moving anywhere, except the column of slow smoke rising from the chimney.

"What now?" Pauling asked.

"We knock," Reacher said. "We move slow and we keep our hands visible."

"You think they’re watching us?"

"Someone is. For sure. I can feel it."

He killed the motor and sat for a moment. Then he opened his door. Unwound his huge frame slow and easy and stood still next to the car with his hands held away from his sides. Pauling did the same thing six feet away. Then they walked together to the front door. It was a large slab of ancient oak, as black as coal. There were iron bands and hinges, newly painted over pits of old rust and corrosion. There was a twisted ring hinged in the mouth of a lion and positioned to strike down on a nail head as big as an apple. Reacher used it, twice, putting heavy thumps into the oak slab. It resonated like a bass drum.