Without Fail (Page 17)

They had the argument right there on the street as they walked through Georgetown.

"Worried about my safety?" Neagley asked. "Because you shouldn't be. Nothing's going to happen to me. I can look after myself. And I can make my own decisions."

"I'm not worried about your safety," Reacher said.

"What then? My performance? I'm way better than you."

"I know you are."

"So what's your problem?"

"Your license. You've got something to lose."

Neagley said nothing.

"You've got a license, right?" Reacher said. "To be in the business you're in? And you've got an office and a job and a home and a fixed location. I'm going to disappear after this. You can't do that."

"Think we're going to get caught?"

"I can afford to take the risk. You can't."

"There's no risk if we don't get caught."

Now Reacher said nothing.

"It's like you told Bannon," she said. "I'm lying there lined up on these guys, I'm going to get an itch in my spine. I need you to watch my back."

"This isn't your fight."

"Why is it yours? Because some woman your brother once dumped got herself killed doing her job? That's tenuous."

Reacher said nothing.

"OK, it's your fight," Neagley said. "I know that. But whatever thing you've got in your head that makes it your fight makes it my fight too. Because I've got the same thing in my head. And even if we didn't think the same, if I had a problem, wouldn't you help me out?"

"I would if you asked."

"So we're even."

"Except I'm not asking."

"Not right now. But you will be. You're two thousand miles from Wyoming and you don't have a credit card to buy a plane ticket with, and I do. You're armed with a folding knife with a three-inch blade and I know a guy in Denver who will give us any weapons we want, no questions asked, and you don't. I can rent a car in Denver to get us the rest of the way, and you can't."

They walked on, twenty yards, thirty.

"OK," Reacher said. "I'm asking."

"We'll get the clothes in Denver," she said. "I know some good places."

They made it to Denver before three in the afternoon Mountain Time. The high plains lay all around them, tan and dormant. The air was thin and bitter cold. There was no snow yet, but it was coming. The runway plows were lined up and ready. The snowdrift fences were prepared. The car rental companies had shipped their sedans south and brought in plenty of new four-wheel-drives. Neagley signed for a GMC Yukon at the Avis counter. They shuttled to the lot and picked it up. It was black and shiny and looked a lot like Froelich's Suburban except it was two feet shorter.

They drove it into the city. It was a long, long way. Space seemed infinitely available even after D.C., which wasn't the most crowded place in the East. They parked in a downtown garage and walked three blocks and Neagley found the store she was looking for. It was an all-purpose outdoor equipment place. It had everything from boots and compasses to zinc stuff designed to stop you getting sunburn on your nose. They bought a bird-watcher's spotting scope and a hiker's large-scale map of central Wyoming and then they moved to the clothing racks. They were full of the kind of stuff you could use halfway up the Rockies and then wear around town without looking like a complete idiot. Neagley went for a walker's heavy-duty outfit in greens and browns. Reacher duplicated his Atlantic City purchases at twice the price and twice the quality. This time he added a hat, and a pair of gloves. He dressed in the changing cubicle. Left Joe's last surviving suit stuffed in the garbage can.

Neagley found a pay phone on the street and stopped in the cold long enough to make a short call. Then they went back to the truck and she drove it out of the garage and through the city center toward the dubious part of town. There was a strong smell of dog food in the air.

"There's a factory here," she said.

Reacher nodded. "No kidding."

She came off a narrow street into some kind of an industrial park and nosed through a tangle of low-built metal structures. There were linoleum dealers and brake shops and places where you could get four snow tires for ninety-nine bucks and other places where you could get your steering realigned for twenty. On one corner there was a long low workshop standing on its own in the center of a quarter-acre of cracked blacktop. The building had a closed roll-up door and a hand-painted sign that read: Eddie Brown Engineering.

"This is your guy?" Reacher asked.

Neagley nodded. "What do we want?"

Reacher shrugged. "No point planning it to death. Something short and something long, one of each, plus some ammunition, I guess. That should do it."

She stopped in front of the roll-up door and hit the horn. A guy came out of a personnel entrance and got halfway to the car before he saw who it was. He was tall and heavy through the neck and shoulders. He had short fair hair and an open amiable face, but he had big hands and thick wrists and wasn't the sort of guy you'd mess with on a whim. He sketched a wave and ducked back inside and a moment later the big door started rolling up. Neagley drove in under it and it came back down behind them.

On the inside the building was about half the size it should have been, but apart from that it looked convincing. The floor was grease-stained concrete and there were metalworkers' lathes here and there, and drilling machines and stacks of raw sheet metal and bundles of steel rods. But the back wall was ten feet closer on the inside than the exterior proportions dictated. Clearly there was a handsome-sized room concealed behind it.

"This is Eddie Brown," Neagley said.

"Not my real name," the big guy said.

He accessed the concealed room by pulling on a big pile of scrap metal. It was all welded together and welded in turn to a steel panel hidden behind it. The whole thing swung open on silent oiled hinges like a giant three-dimensional door. The guy calling himself Eddie Brown led them through it into a whole different situation.

The concealed room was as clean as a hospital. It was painted white and lined on all four sides by shelves and racks. On three walls the shelves held handguns, some of them boxed, some of them loose. The racks were full of long guns, rifles and carbines and shotguns and machine guns, yards of them, all of them neat and parallel. The air was full of the stink of gun oil. The fourth wall was lined like a library with boxes of ammunition. Reacher could smell the new brass and the crisp cardboard and faint traces of powder.

"I'm impressed," he said.

"Take what you need," Eddie said.

"Where do the serial numbers lead to?"

"The Austrian Army," Eddie said. "They kind of fizzle out after that."

Ten minutes later they were back on the road, with Reacher's new jacket carefully spread out in the Yukon's load space over two nine-millimeter Steyr GBs, a Heckler amp; Koch MP5 unsilenced machine gun, an M16 rifle, and boxes full of two hundred rounds for each weapon.

They entered Wyoming after dark, driving north on I-25. They turned left at Cheyenne and picked up I-80. They rolled west to Laramie and then headed north. The town called Grace was still five hours away, well beyond Casper. The map showed it nestled in the middle of nowhere between towering mountains on one side and infinite grasslands on the other.

"We'll stop in Medicine Bow," Reacher said. "Sounds like a cool place. We'll aim to get to Grace at dawn tomorrow."

Medicine Bow didn't look like much of a cool place in the dark, but it had a motel about two miles out with rooms available. Neagley paid for them. Then they found a steakhouse a mile in the other direction and ate twelve-ounce sirloins that cost less than a drink in D.C. The place closed up around them so they took the hint and headed back to their rooms. Reacher left his coat in the truck, to hide the firepower from curious eyes. They said goodnight in the lot. Reacher went straight to bed. He heard Neagley in the shower. She was singing to herself. He could hear it, through the wall.

He woke up at four in the morning, Saturday. Neagley was showering again, and still singing. He thought: When the hell does she sleep? He rolled out of bed and headed for the bathroom. Turned his shower on hot, which must have made hers run cold, because he heard a muffled scream through the wall. So he turned it off again and waited until he heard her finish. Then he showered and dressed and met her out by the car. It was still pitch dark. Still very cold. There were flakes of snow blowing in from the west. They were drifting slowly through the parking lot lights.

"Can't find any coffee," Neagley said.

They found some an hour north. A roadside diner was opening for breakfast. They saw its lights a mile away. It was next to the mouth of a dirt road leading down through the darkness to the Medicine Bow National Forest. The diner looked like a barn, long and low, made out of red boards. Cold outside, warm inside. They sat at a table by a curtained window and ate eggs and bacon and toast and drank strong bitter coffee.

"OK, we'll call them one and two," Neagley said. "One is the Bismarck guy. You'll recognize him. Two is the guy from the garage video. We might recognize him from his build. But we don't really know what he looks like."

Reacher nodded. "So we'll look for the Bismarck guy hanging out with some other guy. No point planning it to death."

"You don't sound very enthusiastic."

"You should go home."

"Now that I've gotten you here?"

"I've got a bad feeling about this."

"You're uptight that Froelich was killed. That's all. Doesn't mean anything's going to happen to me."

He said nothing.

"We're two against two," Neagley said. "You and me against two bozos, and you're worried about it?"

"Not very," he said.

"Maybe they won't even show. Bannon figured they'd know it was a trap."

"They'll show," Reacher said. "They've been challenged. It's a testosterone thing. And they've got more than enough screws loose to jump right on it."

"Nothing's going to happen to me, if they do."

"I'd feel bad if it did."

"It's not going to," she said.

"Tell me I'm not making you do this."

"My own free will," she said.

He nodded. "So let's go."

They got back on the road. Snowflakes hung in the headlight beams. They drifted in weightlessly from the west and shone bright in the light and then whipped backward as they drove. They were big flakes, dry and powdery, not many of them. The road was narrow. It wandered left and right. The surface was lumpy. All around it in the darkness was a vastness so large it sucked the noise of the car away into nothing. They were driving in a bright tunnel of silence, leaping ahead from one lonely snowflake to the next.

"I guess Casper will have a police department," Reacher said.

Neagley nodded at the wheel. "Could be a hundred strong. Casper is nearly as big as Cheyenne. Nearly as big as Bismarck, actually."

"And they'll be responsible for Grace," Reacher said.

"Alongside the state troopers, I guess."

"So any other cops we find there are our guys."

"You're still certain they're cops?"

He nodded. "It's the only way everything makes sense. The initial contact with Nendick and Andretti in the cop bars, the familiarity with the NCIC, the access to the government weapons. Plus the way they slip in and out everywhere. Crowds, confusion, a gold shield gets you anywhere. And if Armstrong's right and their dad was a cop, that's a pretty good predictor. It's a family trade, like the military."

"My dad wasn't in the military."

"But mine was, so there's fifty percent right away. Better than most other professions. And you know what the clincher is?"

"What?"

"Something we should have figured long ago. But we just skated right on by. We missed it, totally. The two dead Armstrongs. How the hell do you just find two white guys with fair hair and blue eyes and the right dates of birth and the right faces and above all the right first and last names? That's a very tall order. But these guys did it. And there's only one practical way of doing it, which is the national DMV database. Driver's license information, names, addresses, dates of birth, photographs. It's all right there, everything you need. And nobody can get into it, except cops, who can dial it right up."

Neagley was silent for a moment.

"OK, they are cops," she said.

"They sure are. And we're brain dead for not spotting it on Tuesday."

"But cops would have heard of Armstrong long ago, wouldn't they?"

"Why would they? Cops know about their own little world, that's all, same as anybody else. If you worked in some rural police department in Maine or Florida or outside San Diego you might know the New York Giants quarterback or the Chicago White Sox center fielder but there's no reason why you would have heard of North Dakota's junior senator. Unless you were a politics junkie, and most people aren't."

Neagley drove on. Way to the right, far to the east, a narrow band of sky was a fraction lighter than it had been. It had turned the color of dark charcoal against the blackness beyond it. The snow was no heavier, no lighter. The big lazy flakes drifted in from the mountains, floating level, sometimes rising.

"So which is it?" she asked. "Maine or Florida or San Diego? We need to know, because if they're flying in they won't be armed with anything they can't pick up here."

"California is a possibility," Reacher said. "Oregon isn't. They wouldn't have revealed their specific identity to Armstrong if they still lived in Oregon. Nevada is a possibility. Or Utah or Idaho. Anywhere else is too far."

"For what?"

"To be on a reasonable radius from Sacramento. How long does a stolen cooler of ice last?"

Neagley said nothing.

"Nevada or Utah or Idaho," Reacher said. "That's my guess. Not California. I think they wanted a state line between them and the place they went for the thumb. Feels better, psychologically. I think they're a long day's drive from Sacramento. Which means they're probably a long day's drive from here, too, in the other direction. So I think they'll be coming in by road, armed to the teeth."

"When?"

"Today, if they've got any sense."

"The bat was mailed in Utah," Neagley said.

Reacher nodded. "OK, so scratch Utah. I don't think they wanted to mail anything in their home state."

"So Idaho or Nevada," Neagley said. "We better watch for license plates."

"This is a tourist destination. There are going to be plenty of out-of-state plates. Like we've got Colorado plates."

"How will they aim to do it?"

"Edward Fox," Reacher said. "They want to survive, and they're reasonable with a rifle. Hundred and twenty yards in Minnesota, ninety in D.C. They'll aim to get him in the church doorway, somewhere like that. Maybe out in the graveyard. Drop him right next to somebody else's headstone."

Neagley slowed and turned right onto Route 220. It was a better road, wider, newer blacktop. It ran with a river wandering next to it. The sky was lighter in the east. Up ahead was a faint glow from the city of Casper, twenty miles north. The snow was still blowing in from the west, slow and lazy.

"So what's our plan?" Neagley asked.

"We need to see the terrain," Reacher said.

He looked sideways out the window. He had seen nothing but darkness since leaving Denver.

They stopped on the outer edge of Casper for gas and more coffee and a bathroom. Then Reacher took a turn at the wheel. He picked up Route 87 north out of town and drove fast for thirty miles because Route 87 was also I-25 again and was wide and straight. And he drove fast because they were late. Dawn was in full swing to the east and they were still well short of Grace. The sky was pink and beautiful and the light came in brilliant horizontal shafts and lit the mountainsides in the west. They were meandering through the foothills. On their right, to the east, the world was basically flat all the way to Chicago and beyond. On their left, distant in the west, the Rocky Mountains reared two miles high. The lower slopes were dotted with stands of pine and the peaks were white with snow and streaked with gray crags. For miles either side of the ribbon of road was high desert, with sagebrush and tan grasses blazing purple in the early sun.

"Been here before?" Neagley asked.

"No," he said.

"We need to turn," she said. "Soon, east toward Thunder Basin."

He repeated the name in his head, because he liked the sound of the words. Thunder Basin. Thunder Basin.

He made a shallow right off the highway onto a narrow county road. There were signposts to Midwest and Edgerton. The land fell away to the east. Pines a hundred feet tall threw morning shadows a hundred yards long. There was endless ragged grassland interrupted here and there by the remains of old industrial enterprises. There were square stone foundations a foot high and tangles of old iron.

"Oil," Neagley said. "And coal mining. All closed down eighty years ago."

"The land looks awful flat," Reacher said.

But he knew the flatness was deceptive. The low sun showed him creases and crevices and small escarpments that were nothing compared to the mountains on his left but were a long way from being flat. They were in a transition area, where the mountains shaded randomly into the high plains. The geological tumult of a million years ago rippled outward all the way to Nebraska, frozen in time, leaving enough cover to hide a walking man in a million different places.

"We need it to be totally flat," Neagley said.

Reacher nodded at the wheel. "Except for maybe one little hill a hundred yards from where Armstrong is going to be. And another little hill a hundred yards back from it, where we can watch from."

"It isn't going to be that easy."

"It never is," Reacher said.

They drove on, another whole hour. They were heading north and east into emptiness. The sun rose well clear of the horizon. The sky was banded pink and purple. Behind them the Rockies blazed with reflected light. Ahead and to the right the grasslands ran into the distance like a stormy ocean.

There was no more snow in the air. The big lazy flakes had disappeared.

"Turn here," Neagley said.

"Here?" He slowed to a stop and looked at the turn. It was just a dirt road, leading south to the middle of nowhere.

"There's a town down there?" he asked.

"According to the map," Neagley said.

He backed up and made the turn. The dirt road ran a mile through pines and then broke out with a view of absolutely nothing.

"Keep going," Neagley said.

They drove on, twenty miles, thirty. The road rose and fell. Then it peaked and the land fell away in front of them into a fifty-mile-wide bowl of grass and sage. The road ran ahead through it straight south like a faint pencil line and crossed a river in the base of the bowl. Two more roads ran into the bridge from nowhere. There were tiny buildings scattered randomly. The whole thing looked like a capital letter K, lightly peppered with habitation where the three lines of the letter met.

"That's Grace, Wyoming," Neagley said. "Where this road crosses the south fork of the Cheyenne River."

Reacher eased the Yukon to a stop. Put it in park and crossed his arms on the top of the wheel. Leaned forward with his chin on his hands and stared ahead through the windshield.

"We should be on horses," he said.

"Wearing white hats," Neagley said. "With Colt.45s."

"I'll stick with the Steyrs," Reacher said. "How many ways in?"

Neagley traced her finger over the map.

"North or south," she said. "On this road. The other two roads don't go anywhere. They peter out in the brush. Maybe they head out to old cattle ranches."

"Which way will the bad guys come?"

"Nevada, they'll come in from the south. Idaho, from the north."

"So we can't stay right here and block the road."

"They might be down there already."

One of the buildings was a tiny pinprick of white in a square of green. Froelich's church, he thought. He opened his door and got out of the car. Walked around to the tailgate and came back with the bird-watcher's spotting scope. It was like half of a huge pair of binoculars. He steadied it against the open door and put it to his eye.

The optics compressed the view into a flat grainy picture that danced and quivered with his heartbeat. He focused until it was like looking down at the town from a half-mile away. The river was a narrow cut. The bridge was a stone structure. The roads were all dirt. There were more buildings than he had first thought. The church stood alone in a tended acre inside the south angle of the K. It had a stone foundation and the rest of it was clapboard painted white. It would have looked right at home in Massachusetts. Its grounds widened out to the south and were mowed grass studded with headstones.

South of the graveyard was a fence, and behind the fence was a cluster of two-story buildings made of weathered cedar. They were set at random angles to one another. North of the church were more of the same. Houses, stores, barns. Along the short legs of the K were more buildings. Some of them were painted white. They were close together near the center of town, farther apart as the distance increased. The river ran blue and clear, east and north into the sea of grass. There were cars and pickups parked here and there. Some pedestrian activity. It looked like the population might reach a couple of hundred.

"It was a cattle town, I guess," Neagley said. "They brought the railroad in as far as Casper, through Douglas. They must have driven the herds sixty, seventy miles south and picked it up there."

"So what do they do now?" Reacher asked.

The town wobbled in the scope as he spoke.

"No idea," she said. "Maybe they all invest on-line."

He passed her the scope and she refocused and stared down through it. He watched the lens move fractionally up and down and side to side as she covered the whole area.

"They'll set up to the south," she said. "All the preservice activity will happen south of the church. They've got a couple of old barns a hundred yards out, and some natural cover."

"How will they aim to get away?"

The scope moved an eighth of an inch, to the right.

"They'll expect roadblocks north and south," she said. "Local cops. That's a no-brainer. Their badges might get them through, but I wouldn't be counting on it. This is a whole different situation. There might be confusion, but there won't be crowds."

"So how?"

"I know how I'd do it," she said. "I'd ignore the roads altogether. I'd take off across the grass, due west. Forty miles of open country in some big four-wheel-drive, and you hit the highway. I doubt the Casper PD has got a helicopter. Or the Highway Patrol. There are only two highways in the whole state."

"Armstrong will come in a helicopter," Reacher said. "Probably from some Air Force base in Nebraska."

"But they won't use his helicopter to chase the bad guys. They'll be exfiltrating him or taking him to a hospital. I'm sure that's some kind of standard protocol."

"Highway Patrol would set up north and south on the highway. They'll have nearly an hour's warning."

Neagley lowered the scope and nodded. "I'd anticipate that. So I'd drive straight across the highway and get back off-road. West of the highway is ten thousand square miles of nothing between Casper and the Wind River Reservation, with only one major road through it. They'd be long gone before somebody whistled up a helicopter and started the search."

"That's a bold plan."

"I'd go for it," Neagley said.

Reacher smiled. "I know you would. Question is, will these guys? I'm wondering if they'll take one look and turn around and forget about it."

"Doesn't matter. We'll take them down while they're looking. We don't need to catch them in the act."

Reacher climbed back into the driver's seat.

"Let's go to work," he said.

The bowl was very shallow. They lost maybe a hundred feet of elevation in the twenty miles they drove before they reached the town. The road was hard-packed dirt, smooth as glass, beautifully scraped and contoured. An annual art, Reacher guessed, performed anew every year when the winter snows melted and the spring rains finished. It was the kind of road Model T Fords rolled down in documentary films. It curved as it approached the town so that the bridge could cross the river at an exact right angle.

The bridge seemed to represent the geographic center of town. There was a general store that offered postal service and a breakfast counter. There was a forge set back behind it that had probably fixed ranch machinery way back in history. There was a feed supplier's office and a hardware store. There was a one-pump gas station with a sign that read: Springs Repaired. There were sidewalks made of wood fronting the buildings. They ran like boat docks, floating on the earth. There was a quiet leathery man loading groceries into a pickup bed.

"They won't come here," Reacher said. "This is the most exposed place I've ever seen."

Neagley shook her head. "They won't know that until they've seen it for themselves. They might be in and out in ten minutes, but ten minutes is all we need."

"Where are we going to stay?"

She pointed. "Over there."

There was a plain-fronted red cedar building with numerous small windows and a sign that read: Clean Rooms.

"Terrific," Reacher said.

"Drive around," Neagley said. "Let's get a feel for the place."

A letter K has only four options for exploration, and they had already covered the northern leg on the way in. Reacher backed up to the bridge and struck out north and east, following the river. That road led past eight houses, four on each side, and then narrowed after another half-mile to a poor stony track. There was a barbed-wire fence lost in the grass on the left, and another on the right.

"Ranch land," Neagley said.

The ranches themselves were clearly miles away. Fragments of the road were visible as it rose and fell over gentle contours into the distance. Reacher turned the truck around and headed back and turned down the short southeast leg. It had more houses and they were closer together, but it was otherwise similar. It narrowed after the same distance and ran on toward nothing visible. There was more barbed wire and an inexplicable wooden shed with no door. Inside the shed was a rusting pickup truck with pale weedy grass growing up all around it. It looked like it had been parked there back when Richard Nixon was Vice President.

"OK, go south," Neagley said. "Let's see the church."

The south leg led seventy miles to Douglas, and they drove the first three miles of it. The town's power and telephone lines came in from that direction, strung on tarred poles, looping on into the distance, following the road. The road passed the church and the graveyard, then the cluster of cedar buildings, then a couple of abandoned cattle barns, then maybe twenty or thirty small houses, and then the town finished and there was just infinite grassland ahead. But it wasn't flat. There were crevices and crevasses worn smooth by ten thousand years of winds and weather. They undulated calmly, up and down to maximum depths of ten or twelve feet, like slow ocean swells. They were all connected in a network. The grass itself was a yard high, brown and dead and brittle. It swayed in waves under the perpetual breeze.

"You could hide an infantry company in there," Neagley said.

Reacher turned the car and headed back toward the church. Pulled over and parked level with the graveyard. The church itself was very similar to the one outside Bismarck. It had the same steep roof over the nave and the same blocky square tower. It had a clock on the tower and a weather vane and a flag, and a lightning rod. It was white, but not as bright. Reacher glanced west to the horizon and saw gray clouds massing over the distant mountains.

"It's going to snow," he said.

"We can't see anything from here," Neagley said.

She was right. The church was built right in the river valley bottom. Its foundation was probably the lowest structure in town. The road to the north was visible for maybe a hundred yards. Same in the south. It ran in both directions and rose over gentle humps and disappeared from sight.

"They could be right on top of us before we know it," Neagley said. "We need to be able to see them coming."

Reacher nodded. Opened his door and climbed out of the car. Neagley joined him and they walked toward the church. The air was cold and dry. The graveyard lawn was dead under their feet. It felt like the beginning of winter. There was a new grave site marked out with cotton tape. It lay to the west of the church, in virgin grass on the end of a row of weathered headstones. Reacher detoured to take a look. There were four Froelich graves in a line. Soon to be a fifth, on some sad day in the near future. He looked at the rectangle of tape and imagined the hole dug deep and crisp and square.

Then he stepped away and looked around. There was flat empty land opposite the church on the east side of the road. It was a big enough space to land a helicopter. He stood and imagined it coming in, rotors thumping, turning in the air to face the passenger door toward the church, setting down. He imagined Armstrong climbing out. Crossing the road. Approaching the church. The vicar would probably greet him near the door. He stepped sideways and stood where Armstrong might stand and raised his eyes. Scanned the land to the south and west. Bad news. There was some elevation there, and about a hundred and fifty yards out there were waves and shadows in the moving grass that must mean dips and crevices in the earth beneath it. There were more beyond that distance, all the way out to infinity.

"How good do you think they are?" he asked.

Neagley shrugged. "They're always either better or worse than you expect. They've shown some proficiency so far. Shooting downhill, thin air, through grass, I'd be worried out to about five hundred yards."

"And if they miss Armstrong they'll hit somebody else by mistake."

"Stuyvesant needs to bring a surveillance helicopter too. This angle is hopeless, but you could see everything from the air."

"Armstrong won't let him," Reacher said. "But we've got the air. We've got the church tower."

He turned and walked back toward it.

"Forget the rooming house," he said. "This is where we're going to stay. We'll see them coming, north or south, night or day. It'll all be over before Stuyvesant or Armstrong even get here."

They were ten feet from the church door when it opened and a clergyman stepped out, closely followed by an old couple. The clergyman was middle-aged and looked very earnest. The old couple were both maybe sixty years old. The man was tall and stooped, and a little underweight. The woman was still good-looking, a little above average height, trim and nicely dressed. She had short fair hair turning gray the way fair hair does. Reacher knew exactly who she was, immediately. And she knew who he was, or thought she did. She stopped talking and stopped walking and just stared at him the same way her daughter had. She looked at his face, confused, like she was comparing similarities and differences against a mental image.

"You?" she said. "Or is it?"

Her face was strained and tired. She was wearing no makeup. Her eyes were dry, but they hadn't been for the last two days. That was clear. They were rimmed with red and lined and swollen.

"I'm his brother," Reacher said. "I'm very sorry for your loss."

"You should be," she said. "Because this is entirely Joe's fault."

"Is it?"

"He made her change jobs, didn't he? He wouldn't date a coworker, so she had to change. He wouldn't change. She went over to the dangerous side, while he stayed exactly where he was, safe and sound. And now look what's come of it."

Reacher paused a beat.

"I think she was happy where she was," he said. "She could have changed back, you know, afterward, if she wasn't. But she didn't. So I think that means she wanted to stay there. She was a fine agent, doing important work."

"How could she change back? Was she supposed to see him every day like nothing had happened?"

"I meant she could have waited the year, and then changed back."

"What difference does a year make? He broke her heart. How could she ever work for him again?"

Reacher said nothing.

"Is he coming here?" she asked.

"No," Reacher said. "He's not."

"Good," she said. "Because he wouldn't be welcome."

"No, I guess he wouldn't," Reacher said.

"I suppose he's too busy," she said.

She walked off, toward the dirt road. The clergyman followed her, and so did Froelich's father. But then he hesitated and turned back.

"She knows it's not really Joe's fault," he said. "We both know Mary Ellen was doing what she wanted."

Reacher nodded. "She was terrific at it."

"Was she?"

"Best they ever had."

The old man nodded, like he was satisfied.

"How is Joe?" he asked. "I met him a couple of times."

"He died," Reacher said. "Five years ago. In the line of duty."

There was quiet for a moment.

"I'm very sorry," the old man said.

"But don't tell Mrs. Froelich," Reacher said. "If it helps her not to know."

The old man nodded again and turned away and set off after his wife with a strange loping stride.

"See?" Neagley said quietly. "Not everything is your fault."

There was a notice board planted in the ground near the church door. It was like a very slim cabinet mounted on sturdy wooden legs. It had glass doors. Behind the doors was a square yard of green felt with slim cotton tapes thumbtacked diagonally all over it. Notices typed on a manual typewriter were slipped behind the tapes. At the top was a permanent list of regular Sunday services. The first was held every week at eight o'clock in the morning. This was clearly a denomination that demanded a high degree of commitment from its parishioners. Next to the permanent list was a hastily typed announcement that this Sunday's eight o'clock service would be dedicated to the memory of Mary Ellen Froelich. Reacher checked his watch and shivered in the cold.

"Twenty-two hours," he said. "Time to lock and load."

They brought the Yukon nearer to the church and opened the tailgate. Bent over together and loaded all four weapons. They took a Steyr each. Neagley took the H amp;K and Reacher took the M16. They distributed the spare rounds between them, as appropriate. Then they locked the car and left it.

"Is it OK to bring guns into a church?" Neagley asked.

"It's OK in Texas," Reacher said. "Probably compulsory here."

They hauled the oak door open and stepped inside. It was very similar to the Bismarck building. Reacher wondered briefly whether rural communities had bought their churches by mail order, the same as everything else. It had the same parchment-white paint, the same shiny pews, the same pulpit. The same three bell ropes hanging down inside the tower. The same staircase. They went all the way up to the high ledge and found a ladder bolted to the wall, with a trapdoor above it.

"Home sweet home," Reacher said.

He led the way up the ladder and through the trapdoor and into the bell chamber. The bell chamber was not the same as the one in Bismarck. It had a clock added into it. There was a four-foot cube of brass machinery mounted centrally on iron girders just above the bells themselves. The clock had two faces, both driven simultaneously by the same gears inside the cube. Long iron shafts ran straight out from the cube, through the walls, through the backs of the faces, all the way to the external hands. The faces were mounted in the openings where the louvers had been, to the east and the west. The machinery was ticking loudly. Gear wheels and ratchets were clicking. They were setting up tiny sympathetic resonances in the bells themselves.

"We've got no view east or west," Reacher said.

Neagley shrugged.

"North and south is all we need," she said. "That's where the road runs."

"I guess," he said. "You take the south."

He ducked under the girders and the iron shafts and crawled over to the louver facing north. Knelt up and looked out. Got a perfect view. He could see the bridge and the river. He could see the whole town. He could see the dirt road leading north. Maybe ten straight miles of it. It was completely empty.

"You OK?" he called.

"Excellent," Neagley called back. "I can almost see Colorado."

"Shout when you spot something."

"You too."

The clock ticked thunk, thunk, thunk, once a second. The sound was loud and precise and tireless. He glanced back at the mechanism and wondered whether it would drive him crazy before it sent him to sleep. He heard expensive alloy touching wood ten feet behind him as Neagley put her submachine gun down. He laid his M16 on the boards next to his knees. Squirmed around until he was as comfortable as he was going to get. Then he settled in to watch and wait.