Worth Dying For

FORTY-THREE

MAHMEINI'S MAN WAS AFRAID. HE HAD DRIVEN AROUND FOR twenty minutes and he had seen nothing at all, and then he had come to a house with a white mailbox with Duncan written on it, all proud and spotlit. The house was a decent place, expensively restored. Their HQ, he had assumed. But no. All it contained was a woman who claimed she knew nothing. She was relatively young. She had been beaten recently. She said there were four Duncans, a father and a son and two uncles. She was married to the son. They were all currently elsewhere. She gave directions to a cluster of three houses that Mahmeini's man had already seen and dismissed from his mind. They were unimpressive places, all meanly hemmed in by an old post-and-rail fence, unlikely homes for men of significance.

But he had set off back in that direction anyway, driving fast, almost running down some idiot pedestrian who loomed up at him out of the dark, and then from the two-lane he had seen a gasoline fire blazing to the north. He had ignored the three houses and hustled onward towards the fire and found it was in the motel lot. It was a car. Or, it had been a car. Now it was just a superheated cherry-red shell inside an inferno. Judging by the shape it had been the Ford that Safir's boys had been driving. They were still inside it. Or, what was left of them was still inside it. They were now just shrunken and hideous shapes, still burning and melting and peeling, their ligaments shrivelled, their hands forced up by the heat like ghastly claws, the furious roiled air in which they were sitting making it look like they were dancing and waving in their seats.

Rossi's boys had killed them, obviously. Which meant they had killed Asghar too, almost certainly, hours ago. Rossi's plan was clear. He already had a firm connection with the Duncans, at the bottom end of the chain. Now he intended to leapfrog both Safir and Mahmeini and sell to the Saudis direct, at the top end of the chain. An obvious move, displaying sound business sense, but Rossi had had his boys start early. They had seized the initiative. A real coup. Their timing was impressive. As were their skills. They had lain in wait for Asghar and taken him down and disposed of his car, all within thirty short minutes. Which was an excellent performance. Asghar was tough and wary, always thinking, not easy to beat. A good wingman. A good friend, too, now crying out for vengeance. Mahmeini's man could sense his presence, very strongly, like he was still close by. All of which made him feel alone and adrift in hostile territory, and very much on the defensive. All of which were unusual feelings for him, and all of which therefore made him a little afraid. And all of which made him change his plan. He had sudden new priorities. The giant stranger could wait. His primary targets were now Rossi's boys.

Mahmeini's man started right there at the motel. He had seen someone earlier, lurking behind a window, watching. A man with strange hair. A local. Possibly the motel owner. At least he would know which way Rossi's boys had gone.

Roberto Cassano and Angelo Mancini were parked four miles north, with their lights off and their engine running. Cassano was on the phone with Rossi. Nearly two o'clock in the morning, but there were important matters to discuss.

Cassano asked, 'You and Seth Duncan made this deal, right?'

Rossi said, 'He was my initial contact, back in the day. It turned into a family affair pretty soon after that. It seems like nothing much happens up there without unanimous consent.'

'But as far as you know it's still your deal?'

'As opposed to what?'

'As opposed to someone else's deal.'

'Of course it's still my deal,' Rossi said. 'No question about that. It always was my deal, and it always will be my deal. Why are you even asking? What the hell is going on?'

'Seth Duncan lent his car to Mahmeini's guy, that's what.'

Silence on the line.

Cassano said, 'There was a Cadillac at the Marriott when we got down there this afternoon. Too old for a rental. Later we saw Mahmeini's guy using it. At first we thought he stole it, but no. The locals up here say it's Seth Duncan's personal ride. Therefore Seth Duncan must have provided him with it. He must have driven it down there and left it ready for him. And then after the initial contact we made, Mahmeini's guy seemed to start operating solo. At first we thought Safir's boys had taken out his partner, or maybe the guy just ran out, but now we think he must have come straight up here in their rental. He's probably hanging out with the Duncans right now. Maybe they both are, like best friends forever. We're getting royally screwed here, boss. We're getting squeezed out.'

'Can't be happening.'

'Boss, your contact lent his car to your rival. They're in bed together. How else do you want to interpret it?'

'I can't get close to the ultimate buyer.'

'You're going to have to try.'

More silence on the line. Then Rossi said, 'OK, I guess nothing is impossible. So go ahead and deal with Mahmeini's boys. Do that first. Make it like they were never born. Then show Seth Duncan the error of his ways. Find some way to get his attention. Through his wife, maybe. And then move in on the three old guys. Tell them if they step out of line again we'll take over the whole thing, all the way up to Vancouver. An hour from now I want them pissing in their pants.'

'What about Reacher?'

'Find him and cut his head off and put it in a box. Show the Duncans we can do anything we want. Show them we can reach out and touch anyone, anywhere, any time. Make sure they understand they could be next.'

Reacher woke up for the second time and knew instantly it was two in the morning. The clock in his head had started up again. And he knew instantly he was in the basement of a house. Not an unfinished swimming pool, not an underground bunker. The concrete was smooth and strong because Nebraska was tornado country, and either zoning laws or construction standards or insurance requirements or just a conscientious architect had demanded an adequate shelter. Which made it the basement of the doctor's house, almost certainly, partly because not enough time had elapsed for a move to another location, and partly because the doctor's house was the only house Reacher had seen that was new enough to be both designed by an architect and be subject to laws and standards and requirements. In the old days people just built things themselves and crossed their fingers and hoped for the best.

Therefore the pipes of various diameters were for water and the sewer and heating. The green metal boxes with the mineral stains were the furnace and the water heater. There was an electrical panel, presumably full of circuit breakers. The stairs came down and the door at the top would open outward into the hallway. Not inward. No one let doors open inward at the top of a staircase. Careless residents would go tumbling down like a slapstick movie. And tornadoes could blow at three hundred miles an hour. Better that a shelter door be pressed more firmly shut, not blown wide open.

Reacher sat up. Evidently he had come to rest in the angle of wall and floor, with his head bent. His neck was a little sore, which he took to be a very good sign. It meant the pain from his nose was relegated to background noise. He raised his hand and checked. His nose was still very tender, and there were open cuts on it, and big pillowy swellings, but the chip of bone was back in the right place. Basically. Almost. More or less. Not pretty, presumably, but then, he hadn't been pretty to start with. He spat in his palm and tried to wipe dried blood off his mouth and his chin.

Then he got to his feet. There was nothing stored in the basement. No crowded shelves, no piles of dusty boxes, no workbench, no peg boards full of tools. Reacher figured all that stuff was in the garage. It had to be somewhere. Every household had stuff like that. But the basement was a tornado shelter, pure and simple. Nothing else. Not even a rec room. There was no battered sofa, no last-generation TV, no old refrigerator, no pool table, no hidden bottles of bourbon. There was nothing down there at all, except the house's essential mechanical systems. The furnace was running hard, and it was making noise. It was a little too loud to hear anything else over. So Reacher crept up the stairs and put his ear to the door. He heard voices, low and indistinct, first one and then another, in a fixed and regular rhythm. Call and response. A man and a woman. Seth Duncan, he thought, asking questions, and either Dorothy Coe or the doctor's wife answering them, with short syllables and no sibilants. Negative answers. No real stress. No pain or panic. Just resignation. Either Dorothy Coe or the doctor's wife was saying No, quite calmly and patiently and resolutely, over and over again, to each new question. And whichever one of them it was, she had an audience. Reacher could sense the low physical vibe of other people in the house, breathing, stirring, moving their feet. The doctor himself, he thought, and two of the football players.

Reacher tried the door handle, slowly and carefully. It turned, but the door didn't open. It was locked, as expected. The door was a stout item, set tight and square in a wall that felt very firm and solid. Because of tornadoes, and laws and standards and requirements, and conscientious architects. He let go of the handle and crept back downstairs. For a moment he wondered if the laws and the standards and the requirements and the conscientious architects had mandated a second way in. Maybe a trapdoor, from the master bedroom. He figured such a thing would make a lot of sense. Storms moved fast, and a sleeping couple might not have time to get along the hallway to the stairs. So he walked the whole floor, looking up, his sore neck protesting, but he saw no trapdoors. No second way in, and therefore no second way out. Just solid unbroken floorboards, laid neatly over the strong multi-ply joists.

He came to rest in the middle of the space. He had a number of options, none of them guaranteed to succeed, some of them complete non-starters. He could turn off the hot water, but that would be a slow-motion provocation. Presumably no one was intending to take a shower in the next few hours. Equally he could turn off the heat, which would be more serious, given the season, but response time would still be slow, and he would be victimizing the innocent as well as the guilty. He could kill all the lights, at the electrical panel, one click of a circuit breaker, but there was at least one shotgun upstairs, and maybe flashlights too. He was on the wrong side of a locked door, unarmed, attacking from the low ground.

Not good.

Not good at all.

FORTY-FOUR

SETH DUNCAN HAD HIS RIGHT HAND FLAT ON THE DOCTOR'S DINING table, with a bag of peas from the freezer laid over it. The icy cold was numbing the pain, but not very effectively. He needed another shot of his uncle Jasper's pig anaesthetic, and he was about to go get one, but before he attended to himself he was determined to attend to his plan, which was working pretty well at that point. So well, in fact, that he had permitted himself to think ahead to the endgame. His long experience in the county had taught him that reality was whatever people said it was. If no one ever mentioned an event, then it had never happened. If no one ever mentioned a person, then that person had never existed.

Duncan was alone on one side of the table, with the dark window behind him and the doctor and his wife and Dorothy Coe opposite him, lined up on three hard chairs, upright and attentive. He was leading them one by one through a series of questions, listening to their answers, judging their sincerity, establishing the foundations of the story as it would be told in the future. He had finished with the doctor, and he had finished with the doctor's wife, and he was about to start in on Dorothy Coe. He had a Cornhusker standing mute and menacing in the doorway, holding the old Remington pump, and he had another out in the hallway, leaning on the basement door. The other three were out somewhere in their cars, driving around in the dark, pretending to hunt for Reacher. The illusion had to be maintained, for the sake of Rossi's boys. Reacher's capture was scheduled for much later in the day. Reality was what people said it was.

Duncan asked, 'Did you ever meet a man named Reacher?'

Dorothy Coe didn't answer. She just glanced to her left, out to the hallway. A stubborn woman, hung up on quaint old notions of objectivity.

Duncan said, 'That's a very strong basement door. I know, because I installed the same one myself, when we remodelled. It has a steel core, and it fits into a steel frame, and it has oversized hinges and a burst-proof lock. It's rated for a category five storm. It can withstand a three-hundred-mile-an-hour gust. It carries a FEMA seal of approval. So if, just hypothetically, there was a person in the basement right now, you may rest assured that he's staying there. Such a person could not possibly escape. Such a person might as well not exist at all.'

Dorothy Coe asked, 'If the door is so good, why do you have a football player leaning on it?'

'He has to be somewhere,' Duncan said. Then he smiled. 'Would you prefer it if he was in the bedroom? Maybe he could kill some time in there, with your little friend, while you answer my questions.'

Dorothy Coe glanced the other way, at the doctor's wife.

Duncan asked, 'Did you ever meet a man named Reacher?'

Dorothy Coe didn't answer.

Duncan said, 'The calendar rolls on. It will be spring before you know it. You'll be ploughing and planting. With a bit of luck the rains will be right and you'll have a good harvest. But then what? Do you want it hauled? Or do you want to put a gun in your mouth, like your worthless husband?'

Dorothy Coe said nothing.

Duncan asked, 'Did you ever meet a man named Reacher?'

Dorothy Coe said, 'No.'

'Did you ever hear of a man named Reacher?'

'No.'

'Was he ever at your house?'

'No.'

'Did you ever give him breakfast?'

'No.'

'Was he here when you arrived tonight?'

'No.'

Out in the hallway, three inches from the second Cornhusker's hip, the handle on the basement door turned, a quarter circle, and paused a beat, and turned back.

No one noticed.

In the dining room, Duncan asked, 'Did any kind of stranger come here this winter?'

Dorothy Coe said, 'No.'

'Anyone at all?'

'No.'

'Any local troubles here?'

'No.'

'Did anything change?'

'No.'

'Do you want anything to change?'

'No.'

'That's good,' Duncan said. 'I like the status quo, very much, and I'm glad you do too. It benefits all of us. No reason why we can't all get along.' He got up, leaving the bag of peas on the table, a little meltwater beading on the wax. He said, 'You three stay here. My boys will look after you. Don't attempt to leave the house, and don't attempt to use the phone. Don't even answer it. The phone tree is off-limits tonight. You're out of the loop. Punishments for non-compliance will be swift and severe.'

Then Duncan put his parka on, awkwardly, leading with his left hand, and he stepped past the guy with the Remington and headed for the front door. The others heard it open and close and a minute later they heard the Mazda drive away, the sound of its exhaust ripping the night air behind it.

* * *

Mahmeini's man drove the Cadillac south on the two-lane, five gentle miles, and then he turned the lights off and slowed to a walk. The big engine whispered and the soft tyres rustled over the pavement. He saw the three old houses on his right. There was a light burning in one of the downstairs windows. Beyond that, there were no signs of life. There were three vehicles parked out front, vague moonlit shapes, all of them old, all of them rustic and utilitarian pick-up trucks, none of them a new blue Chevrolet. But the Chevrolet would come. Mahmeini's man was absolutely sure of that. Half of Rossi's attention was fixed on leapfrogging Safir and Mahmeini himself, which meant the other half was fixed on securing his rear. His relationship with the Duncans had to be protected. Which meant his boys would be checking in with them often, calming them, stroking them, reassuring them, and above all making sure no one else was getting close to them. Standard commonsense precautions, straight out of the textbook.

Mahmeini's man rolled past the end of the Duncans' driveway and U-turned and parked a hundred yards south on the opposite shoulder, half on the blacktop, half on the dirt, his lights off, the big black car nestled in a slight natural dip, about as invisible as it was possible to get without a camouflage net. There would be a dull moonlit glow from some of the chrome, he figured, but there was mist in the air, and anyway Rossi's boys would be looking at the mouth of the driveway ahead of their turn, not at anything else. Drivers always did that. Human nature. Steering a car was as much a mental as a physical process. Heads turned, eyes sought their target, and the hands followed automatically.

Mahmeini's man waited. He was facing north, because on balance he expected Rossi's boys to come from the north, but it was always possible they would come from the south, so he adjusted his mirror to get a view in that direction. The mist that was helping to hide him was fogging his rear window a little. Nothing serious, but an approaching car with its lights off might be difficult to see. But then, why would Rossi's boys be driving with their lights off? They were three-for-three on the night, and therefore probably very confident.

Five miles north the orange glow of the gasoline fire was still visible, but it was dying back a little. Nothing burns for ever. Above the glow the moon was smudged with smoke. Apart from that the night-time landscape lay dark and quiet and still and uneventful, like it must have done for a century or more. Mahmeini's man stared at the road ahead, and saw nothing.

He waited.

Then he saw something.

Way ahead and off to his left he saw a blue glow in the mist, a high round bubble of light, moving fast from west to east. A car, coming in at him at a right angle, aiming to hit the two-lane a mile or two north of him, aiming to turn either left and away from him, or right and towards him. He took his gun from his pocket and laid it on the passenger seat next to him. The moving bubble of light slowed, and stopped, and started again, and flared bright. The car had turned right, towards him. Immediately he knew it was not the Chevrolet. The way the light moved told him it was too small, too low, too nimble. Porsches and Ferraris in Vegas moved the same way at night, their front ends rigidly connected to the pavement, their headlights jittering and hopping. Big dumb domestic sedans looked anaesthetized in comparison. They moved like lumps, swaying, dull and damped and padded and disconnected.

He watched and waited, and he saw the bubble of light resolve itself to twin nervous beams and then twin oval shapes close together and low to the ground. He saw the car slow two hundred yards away and then he saw it turn one hundred yards away, straight into the mouth of the driveway. It was the tiny red Mazda Miata he had seen parked at the restored Duncan farmhouse. The daughter-in-law's car. She was visiting. Not a social occasion, presumably. Not so late at night. She had called ahead on the phone, probably. She had reported the encounter with the strange Iranian man, and she had been told to come on in, for safety's sake. Probably the Duncans knew certain things were due to be settled before dawn, and they didn't want one of their own caught in the crossfire.

Mahmeini's man watched the Mazda bump and bounce down the driveway. He watched it park alongside the old pick-up trucks. He saw its lights go off. Ten seconds later he saw a doorway flare bright in the distance as a figure went inside, and then the scene went dark again.

Mahmeini's man watched the road, and waited. The night mist was getting worse. It was becoming a problem. The Cadillac's windshield was going opaque. He fumbled around and found the wiper stalk and flicked the blades right, left, right, left, and cleared it. Which made the rear screen all the worse in comparison. It was completely dewed over. Even a car with its headlights on would be hard to recognize. Its lights would be atomized into a million separate shards, into a single blinding mess. Worse than useless.

Mahmeini's man kept one eye on the road ahead and groped around for the rear defogger button. It was hard to find. With the lights off outside, the dash and all the consoles were unlit inside. And there were a lot of buttons. It was a luxury car, fully equipped. He ducked his head and found a button with zigzag symbols on it. It looked like something to do with heating. And it had a red warning lens laid into it. He pressed it, and waited. Nothing happened to the rear window, but his ass got hot. It was the seat warmer, not the defogger. He turned it off and found another button, one eye on the console, one eye on the road ahead. He pressed the button. The radio came on, very loud. He shut it down in a hurry and tried again, another button close by, a satisfying tactile click under his fingertip.

The trunk lid clunked and popped and raised itself up, slowly and smoothly, damped and hydraulic, all the way open, completely vertical.

Now he had no view at all out the back.

Not good.

And presumably there was a courtesy light in the trunk, in reality quite weak and yellow, but no doubt looking like a million-watt searchlight in the dark of the night.

Not good at all.

He pressed the button again, not really thinking. Afterwards he realized he had half expected the trunk lid to close again, slowly and obediently, like the seat warmer and the radio had gone off again. But of course the trunk lid didn't close again. The release mechanism merely clicked and whirred one more time, and the trunk lid stayed exactly where it was.

Wide open.

Blocking his view.

He was going to have to get out and close it by hand.

FORTY-FIVE

ROBERTO CASSANO AND ANGELO MANCINI HAD BEEN IN THE AREA three whole days, and they figured their one real solid-gold advantage over Mahmeini's crew was their local knowledge. They knew the lie of the land, literally. Most of all, they knew it was flat and empty. Like a gigantic pool table, with brown felt. Big fields, for efficiency's sake, no ditches, no hedges, no other natural obstacles, the ground frozen firm and hard. So even though their car was a regular street sedan, they could drive it cross-country without a major problem, pretty much like sailing a small boat on a calm open sea. And they had seen the Duncan compound up close. They had been in it. They knew it well. They could loop around behind it in the car, slow and quiet, lights off, inky blue and invisible in the dark, and then they could get out and climb the crappy post-and-rail fence, and storm the place from the rear. Surprise was everything. There might be eyeballs to the front, but in back there would be nothing at all except the Duncans and Mahmeini's guys all sitting around in one of the kitchens, probably toasting each other with cheap bourbon and sniggering about their newly streamlined commercial arrangements.

Two handgun rounds would take care of that happy conversation.

Cassano came south on the two-lane and switched off his lights level with the motel. The Ford was still burning in the lot, but only just. The remains of the tyres were still giving off coils of greasy rubber smoke, and small flames were licking out of the gravel all around where oil had spilled. Safir's boys were dark shrunken shapes about half their original size, both fused to the zigzag springs that were all that was left of the seats, their mouths forced open like awful shrieks, their heads burned smooth, their hands up like talons. Mancini smiled and Cassano rolled slowly past them and headed on down the road, cautiously, navigating by the light of the moon.

Four miles south of the motel and one mile north of the Duncan place he slowed some more and turned the wheel and bumped across the shoulder and struck out across the open land. The car lurched and pattered. In a geological sense the ground was dead flat, but down there where the rubber met the dirt it was rutted and lumpy. The springs creaked and bounced and the wheel jumped and chattered in Cassano's hands. But he made steady progress. He kept it to about twenty miles an hour and held a wide curve, aiming to arrive about half a mile behind the compound. Two minutes, he figured. At one point he had to brake hard and steer around a bramble thicket. Just beyond it they saw the burned-out shell of an SUV. It loomed up at them out of the dark, all black and ashen grey. Reacher's work, from earlier in the day. But after that it was easy all the way. They could see a pool of faint yellow light ahead, like a homing beacon. A kitchen window, almost certainly, spilling warmth. The southernmost house, probably. Jacob Duncan's place. The big cheese.

Mahmeini's man climbed out of the Cadillac and stood for a second in the night-time cold. He looked all around, east, west, north, south, and he saw nothing stirring. He closed his door, to kill the interior light. He took a step towards the trunk. He had been right. There was a light in the trunk. It was throwing a pale sphere of yellow glow into the mist. Not serious from the front, but a problem from behind. The human eye was very sensitive.

He took another step, past the rear passenger door, and he raised his left hand, palm flat, somehow already feeling the familiar sensations associated with an action he had performed a thousand times before, his palm on the metal maybe a foot from the edge of the lid, so that the force of his push would act on both hinges equally, so that the panel would not buckle, so that both calibrated springs would stretch together with soft creaks, whereupon the lid would go down smooth and easy until the upmarket mechanism grabbed at it and sucked it all the way shut.

He got as far as putting his palm on the panel.

Subconsciously he leaned into the motion, not really intending to slam the lid, not at all bad-tempered, just seeking a little physical leverage, and his change of position hunched his shoulders a little, which brought his head forward a little, which changed his eye line a little, which meant he had to look somewhere, and given the choice of the lit interior of a previously closed space or a featureless length of dark blacktop, well, any human eye would opt for the former over the latter.

Asghar Arad Sepehr stared back at him.

His sightless eyes were wide open. His olive skin was pale with death and yellow in the light. Forces from braking and accelerating and turning had jammed him awkwardly into the far rear corner of the trunk. His limbs were in disarray. His neck was bent. His look was quizzical.

Mahmeini's man stood absolutely still, his hand on the cold metal, his mouth open, not really breathing, his heart hardly beating. He forced himself to look away. Then he looked back. He wasn't hallucinating. Nothing had changed. He started breathing again. Then he started panting. His heart started thumping. He started to shake and shiver.

Asghar Arad Sepehr stared up at him.

Mahmeini's man took his hand off the trunk lid and shuffled all the way around to the rear of the car. He stood there with the idling exhaust pooling around his knees and with his fingers steepled against his forehead, looking down, not understanding. Asghar was stone dead, but there was no blood. No gunshot wound between the eyes. No blunt-force trauma, no caved-in skull, no signs of strangulation or suffocation, no knife wounds, no defensive injuries. Nothing at all, except his friend, dead in the trunk, all slack and undignified, all thrown about and jumbled up.

Mahmeini's man walked away, ten feet, then twenty, and then he turned back and raised his head and raised his arms and howled silently at the moon, his eyes screwed tight shut, his mouth wide open in a desperate snarl, his feet stamping alternately like he was running in place, all alone in the vast empty darkness.

Then he stopped and swiped his hands over his face, one after the other, and he started thinking. But the subtleties were almost completely beyond him. His friend had been killed sixty miles away, by an unknown person and an unknown method with no visible signs, and then locked in the trunk of a car that could have absolutely nothing at all to do with either Rossi's boys, or Safir's. Then his own rental had been taken away, so that he had been forced to steal the very same car, the only possible choice in an entire town, inevitably and inexorably, like a puppet being manipulated from afar by a grinning intelligence much greater than his own.

It was incomprehensible.

But, facts were facts. He walked back to the trunk and steeled himself to investigate further. He pushed and pulled and hauled Asghar into the centre of the space and began a detailed examination, like a pathologist leaning over a mortuary table. The trunk light burned bright and hot, but it revealed nothing. Asghar had no broken bones, and no bruises. His neck was intact. He had no wounds, no cuts, no scrapes, no scratches, and there was nothing under his fingernails. His gun and his knife and his money were missing, which was interesting. And all around him in the trunk were the usual kinds of things a person might expect to find in a trunk, which was odd. No attempt had been made to clean it up. No incriminating evidence had been removed. There was an empty grocery bag with a week-old register receipt inside, and a month-old local newspaper never read and still neatly folded, and some browned and curled leaves and some crumbs of dirt as if items had been hauled home from a plant nursery. Clearly the car belonged to someone who used it in a fairly normal manner, and who had not prepared it in any special way for its current gruesome task.

So, whose car was it? That was the first question. The licence plates would reveal the answer, of course, assuming they were genuine. But there might be a faster way to find out, given the fact that nothing seemed to have been sanitized. Mahmeini's man stepped away to the front passenger door, and opened it, and leaned in, and opened the glove box. He found a black leather wallet the size of a hardcover book, stamped on the front with the Cadillac shield in gold. Inside it he found two instruction books, one thick, one thin, one for the car and one for the radio, and a salesman's business card clipped into four angled slots, and a registration document, and an insurance document. He pulled out both documents and dropped the wallet in the foot well and held the documents close to the light inside the glove box.

The car was Seth Duncan's.

Which was logical, in a sudden, awful, spectacular way. Because everything had been utterly, utterly miscalculated, right from the start. There was no other possible explanation. There was no giant stranger on the rampage. No one had seen him and no one could describe him, because he didn't exist. He was an invention. He was imaginary. He was bait. He was a ruse. The whole delivery delay was bullshit. It had been staged, from beginning to end. The purpose had been to lure everyone to Nebraska, to be cut out, to be eliminated, to be killed. The Duncans were removing links, severing the chain, intending to remake it with nobody between themselves at the bottom and the Saudis at the top, with a truly massive increase in profit as their prize. Audacious, but obvious, and clearly feasible, clearly within their grasp, because clearly their abilities had been grotesquely underestimated by everyone. They were not the clueless rural hicks everyone thought they were. They were ruthless strategists of stunning and genuine quality, subtle, sophisticated, capable of great insight and penetrating analysis. They had foreseen Mahmeini as their strongest opponent, quite correctly and accurately and realistically, and they had absolutely crippled his response from the get-go by taking Asghar down, somehow, mysteriously, before the bell had even sounded, and then by leaving his untouched body in a car they knew for sure would be found and identified as one of their own.

So, not just a coup, but a message too, brazenly and artfully and subtly delivered. A message that said: We can do anything we want. We can reach out and touch anyone, anywhere, any time, and you won't even begin to understand how we did it. And in case subtlety didn't impress, they had reached out and burned Safir's guys to death in the motel lot, in a brutal demonstration of range and power. Rossi's boys hadn't done that. Rossi's boys were probably already dead themselves, somewhere else, somehow else, maybe dismembered or bled out or even crucified. Or buried alive. Rossi's spokesman had used those very words, on the subject of the Duncans' tastes.

Mahmeini's man felt completely alone. He was completely alone. He was the last survivor. He had no friends, no allies, no familiarity with the terrain. And no idea what to do next, except to lash out, to fight back, to seek revenge.

No desire to do anything else, either.

He stared through the darkness at the three Duncan houses. He closed the trunk lid on Asghar, reverently, with soft pressure from eight gentle fingertips, like a sad chord on a church organ. Then he walked along the dirt on the shoulder, back to the passenger door, and he leaned in and picked up his Glock from where it lay on the seat. He closed the door, and skirted the hood, and crossed the road, and stepped on to the dirt of someone's fallow field, and walked a straight line, parallel with the Duncans' fenced driveway, their three houses a hundred yards ahead of him, his gun in his right hand, his knife in his left.

* * *

Half a mile behind the Duncan houses, Roberto Cassano slowed and hauled the Chevrolet through a tight turn and let it coast onward towards the compound. A hundred yards out he brought it to a stop with the parking brake. He reached up and switched the dome light so it would stay off when the doors opened. He looked at Angelo Mancini next to him, and they both paused and then nodded and climbed out into the night. They drew their Colts and held them behind their backs, so that the moon glinting off the shiny steel would not be visible from the front. They walked forward together, shoulder to shoulder, a hundred yards to go.

FORTY-SIX

THE DOCTOR AND HIS WIFE AND DOROTHY COE WERE SITTING quiet in the dining room, but the football player with the shotgun had moved out of the doorway and gone into the living room, where he was sprawled out full-length on the sofa, watching recorded NFL highlights in high definition on the doctor's big new television set. His partner had moved off the basement door and was leaning comfortably on the hallway wall, watching the screen at an angle, from a distance. They were both absorbed in the programme. The sound was low but distinct, grumbling richly and urgently through the big loudspeakers. The room lights were off, and bright colours from the screen were dancing and bouncing off the walls. Outside the window, the night was dark and still. The phone had rung three times, but no one had answered. Apart from that, all was peaceful. It could have been the day after Christmas, or late on a Thanksgiving afternoon.

Then all the power in the house went out.

The TV picture died abruptly and the sound faded away and the subliminal hum of the heating system disappeared. Silence clamped down, elemental and absolute, and the temperature seemed to drop, and the walls seemed to dissolve, as if there was no longer a difference between inside and out, as if the house's tiny footprint had suddenly blended with the vast emptiness on which it stood.

The football player in the hallway pushed off the wall and stood still in the centre of the space. His partner in the living room swivelled his feet to the floor and sat up straight. He said, 'What happened?'

The other guy said, 'I don't know.'

'Doctor?'

The doctor got up from behind the dining table and fumbled his way to the door. He said, 'The power went out.'

'No shit, Sherlock. Did you pay your bill?'

'It's not that.'

'Then what is it?'

'Could be the whole area.'

The guy in the living room found his way to the window and peered into the blackness outside. He said, 'How the hell would anyone know?'

The guy in the hallway asked, 'Where are the circuit breakers?'

The doctor said, 'In the basement.'

'Terrific. Reacher's awake. And he's playing games.' The guy crept through the dark to the basement door, feeling his way with his fingertips on the hallway wall. He identified the door by touch and pounded on it. He called, 'Turn it back on, asshole.'

No response.

Pitch black throughout the house. Not even a glimmer, anywhere.

'Turn the power back on, Reacher.'

No response.

Cold, and silence.

The guy from the living room found his way out to the hallway. 'Maybe he isn't awake. Maybe it's a real outage.'

His partner asked, 'Got a flashlight, doctor?'

The doctor said, 'In the garage.'

'Go get it.'

'I can't see.'

'Do your best, OK?'

The doctor shuffled down the hallway, hesitantly, fingers brushing the wall, colliding with the first guy, sensing the second guy's hulking presence and avoiding it, making it to the kitchen, stumbling against a chair with a hollow rattle of wood, hitting the edge of the table with his thighs. The world of the blind. Not easy. He trailed his fingers along the countertops, passing the sink, passing the stove, making it to the mud room lobby in back. He turned ninety degrees with his hands out in front of him and found the door to the garage. He groped for the knob and opened the door and stepped down into the chill space beyond. He found the workbench and reached up and traced his fingers over the items clipped neatly above it. A hammer, good for hitting. Screwdrivers, good for stabbing. Wrenches, stone cold to the touch. He found the flashlight's plastic barrel and pulled it out from its clip. He thumbed the switch and a weak yellow beam jumped out. He rapped the head against his palm and the beam sparked a little brighter. He turned and found a football player standing right next to him. The one from the living room.

The football player smiled and took the flashlight out of his hand and held it under his chin and made a face, like a Halloween lantern. He said, 'Good work, doc,' and turned away and used the beam up and down and side to side to paint his way back into the house. The doctor followed, using the same lit memories a second later. The football player said, 'Go back in the dining room now,' and shone the beam ahead, showing the doctor the way. The doctor went back to the table and the football player said, 'All of you stay right where you are, and don't move a muscle,' and then he closed the door on them.

His partner said, 'So what now?'

The guy with the flashlight said, 'We need to know if Reacher is awake or asleep.'

'We hit him pretty hard.'

'Best guess?'

'What's yours?'

The guy with the flashlight didn't answer. He stepped back down the hallway to the basement door. He pounded on it with the flat of his hand. He called, 'Reacher, turn the power back on, or something bad is going to happen up here.'

No response.

Silence.

The guy with the flashlight hit the door again and said, 'I'm not kidding, Reacher. Turn the damn power back on.'

No response.

Silence.

The other guy asked again, 'So what now?'

The guy with the flashlight said, 'Go get the doctor's wife.' He aimed the beam at the dining room door and his partner went in and came back out holding the doctor's wife by the elbow. The guy with the flashlight said, 'Scream.'

She said, 'What?'

'Scream, or I'll make you.'

She paused a beat and blinked in the light of the beam, and then she screamed, long and high and loud. Then she stopped and dead silence came back and the guy with the flashlight hammered on the basement door again and called, 'You hear that, asshole?'

No response.

Silence.

The guy with the flashlight jerked the beam back towards the dining room and his partner led the doctor's wife back down the hallway and pushed her inside and closed the door on her again. He said, 'So?'

The guy with the flashlight said, 'We wait for daylight.'

'That's four hours away.'

'You got a better idea?'

'We could call the mothership.'

'They'll just tell us to handle it.'

'I'm not going down there. Not with him.'

'Me either.'

'So what do we do?'

'We wait him out. He thinks he's smart, but he isn't. We can sit in the dark. Anyone can. It ain't exactly rocket science.'

They followed the dancing beam back to the living room and sat side by side on the sofa with the old Remington propped between them. They clicked off the flashlight, to save the battery, and the room went pitch dark again, and cold, and silent.

Mahmeini's man walked parallel with the driveway for a hundred yards and then came up against a length of fence that ran south directly across his path. It defined the lower left-hand part of the crossbar of the hollow T that was the Duncans' compound. It was made of five-inch rails, all of them a little gnarled and warped, but easy enough to climb. He got over it without any difficulty and paused for a second with the three pick-up trucks and the Mazda parked to his left, and the southernmost house straight in front of him. The centre house was the only one that was dark. The southernmost and the northernmost houses both had light in them, faint and a little secondhand, as if only back rooms were in use and stray illumination was finding its way out to the front windows through internal passageways and open doors. There was the smell of wood smoke in the air. But no sound, not even talking. Mahmeini's man hesitated, choosing, deciding, making up his mind. Left or right?

Cassano and Mancini came on the compound from the rear, out of the dark and dormant field, and they stopped on the far side of the fence opposite the centre house, which was Jonas's, as far as they knew. It was closed up and dark, but both its neighbours had light in their kitchen windows, spilling out in bright bars across the weedy backyard gravel. The gravel was matted down into the dirt, but it was still marginally noisy, Cassano knew. He had walked across it earlier in the day, to find undisturbed locations for his phone conversations with Rossi. Their best play would be to stay on the wrong side of the fence, in the last of the field, and then head directly for their chosen point of entry. That would reduce the sound of their approach to a minimum. But which would be their chosen point of entry? Left or right? Jasper's place, or Jacob's?

All four Duncans were in Jasper's basement, hunting through old cartons for more veterinary anaesthetic. The last of the hog dope had been used on Seth's nose, and his busted hand was going to need something stronger anyway. Two fingers were already swollen so hard the skin was fit to burst. Jasper figured he had something designed for horses, and he planned to find it and flood Seth's wrist joint with it. He was no anatomist, but he figured the affected nerves had to pass through there somewhere. Where else could they go?

Seth was not complaining at the delay. Jasper figured he was taking it very well. He was growing up. He had been petulant after the broken nose, but now he was standing tall. Because he had captured his assailant all by himself, obviously. And because he was planning what to do with the guy next. The glow of achievement and the prospect of revenge were anaesthetics all by themselves.

Jonas asked, 'Is this it?' He was holding up a round pint bottle made of brown glass. Its label was stained and covered in long technical words, some of them Latin. Jasper squinted across the dim space and said, 'Good man. You found it.'

Then they heard footsteps on the floor above their heads.