Lee Child: Without Fail

There was no chair next to the table. Clearly the Froelichs came from a generation that preferred to stand up while talking on the telephone. Reacher unraveled the cord and held the phone to his ear.

“Stuyvesant?” he said.

“Reacher? You got any good news for me?”

“Not yet.”

“What’s the situation?”

“The service is scheduled for eight o’clock,” Reacher said. “But I guess you know that already.”

“What else do I need to know?”

“You coming in by chopper?”

“That’s the plan. He’s still in Oregon right now. We’re going to fly him to an air base in South Dakota and then take a short hop in an Air Force helicopter. We’ll have eight people altogether, including me.”

“He only wanted three.”

“He can’t object. We’re all her friends.”

“Can’t you have a mechanical problem? Just stay in South Dakota?”

“He’d know. And the Air Force wouldn’t play anyway. They wouldn’t want to go down in history as the reason why he couldn’t make it.”

Reacher stood and looked out the window. “OK, so you’ll see the church easy enough. You’ll land across the street to the east. There’s a good place right there. Then he’s got about fifty yards to the church door. I can absolutely guarantee the immediate surroundings. We’re going to be in the church all night. But you’re going to hate what you see farther out. There’s about a hundred-fifty-degree field of fire to the south and west. It’s completely open. And there’s plenty of concealment.”

Silence in D.C.

“I can’t do it,” Stuyvesant said. “I can’t bring him into that. Or any of my people. I’m not going to lose anybody else.”

“So just hope for the best,” Reacher said.

“Not my way. You’re going to have to deliver.”

“We will if we can.”

“How will I know? You don’t have radios. Cell phones won’t work out there. And it’s too cumbersome to keep on using this land line.”

Reacher paused for a second.

“We’ve got a black Yukon,” he said. “Right now it’s parked on the road, right next to the church, to the east. If it’s still there when you show up, then pull out and go home. Armstrong will just have to swallow it. But if it’s gone, then we’re gone, and we won’t be gone unless we’ve delivered, you follow?”

“OK, understood,” Stuyvesant said. “A black Yukon east of the church, we abort. No Yukon, we land. Have you searched the town?”

“We can’t do a house-to-house. But it’s a very small place. Strangers are going to stand out, believe me.”

“Nendick came around. He’s talking a little. He says the same as Andretti. He was approached by the two of them and took them to be cops.”

“They are cops. We’re definite about that. Did you get descriptions?”

“No. He’s still thinking about his wife. Didn’t seem right to tell him he probably didn’t need to.”

“Poor guy.”

“I’d like to get some closure for him. At least find her body, maybe.”

“I’m not planning an arrest here.”

Silence in D.C.

“OK,” Stuyvesant said. “I guess we won’t be seeing you either way. So, good luck.”

“You too,” Reacher said.

He put the receiver back in the cradle and tidied the cord into a neat curl on the table. Looked out at the view. The window faced north and east across an empty ocean of waist-high grass. Then he turned away from it and saw Mr. Froelich watching him from the parlor doorway.

“They’re coming here, aren’t they?” the old man said. “The people who killed my daughter? Because Armstrong is coming here.”

“They might be here already,” Reacher said.

Mr. Froelich shook his head. “Everybody would be talking about it.”

“Did you see that gold truck come through?”

The old man nodded. “It passed me, going real slow.”

“Who was in it?”

“I didn’t see. The windows were dark. I didn’t like to stare.”

“OK,” Reacher said. “If you hear about anybody new in town, come and tell me.”

The old man nodded again. “You’ll know as soon as I do. And I’ll know as soon as anybody new arrives. Word travels fast here.”

“We’ll be in the church tower,” Reacher said.

“Are you here on behalf of Armstrong?”

Reacher said nothing.

“No,” Mr. Froelich said. “You’re here to take an eye for an eye, aren’t you?”

Reacher nodded. “And a tooth for a tooth.”

“A life for a life.”

“Two for five, to be accurate,” Reacher said. “They get the fat end of the deal.”

“Are you comfortable with that?”

“Are you?”

The old guy’s watery eyes flicked all around the sunless room and came to rest on his daughter’s eighteen-year-old face.

“Do you have a child?” he asked.

“No,” Reacher said. “I don’t.”

“Neither do I,” the old man said. “Not anymore. So I’m comfortable with it.”

Reacher walked back to the Yukon and took the hiker’s map off the backseat. Then he climbed the church tower and found Neagley shuttling back and forth between the north and south side.

“All clear,” she said, over the tick of the clock.

“Stuyvesant called,” he said. “To the Froelichs’ house. He’s panicking. And Nendick woke up. Same approach as Andretti.”

He unfolded the map and spread it out flat on the bell chamber floor. Put his finger on Grace. It was in the center of a rough square made by four roads. The square was maybe eighty miles high and eighty wide. The right-hand perimeter was made by Route 59, which ran up from Douglas in the south through a town called Bill to a town called Wright in the north. The top edge of the square was Route 387, which ran west from Wright to Edgerton. Both roads were shown on the map as secondaries. They had driven part of 387 already and knew it to be a pretty decent strip of blacktop. The left-hand edge of the square was I-25, which came down from Montana in the north and ran straight past Edgerton and all the way down to Casper. The bottom of the square was also I-25, where it came out of Casper and doglegged east to Douglas before turning south again and heading for Cheyenne. The whole eighty-mile square was split into two more or less equal vertical rectangles by the dirt road that ran north to south through Grace. That road showed up on the map as a thin dotted gray line. The key in the margin called it an unpaved minor track.

“What do you think?” Neagley asked.

Reacher traced the square with his finger. Widened his radius and traced a hundred miles east, and north, and west, and south. “I think that in the whole history of the western United States no person has ever just passed through Grace, Wyoming. It’s inconceivable. Why would anybody? Any coherent journey south to north or east to west would miss it altogether. Casper to Wright, say. Bottom left to top right. You’d use I-25 east to Douglas and Route 59 north out of Douglas to Wright. Coming through Grace makes no sense at all. It saves no miles. It just slows you down, because it’s a dirt track. And would you even notice the track? Remember what it looked like at the north end? I thought it was going nowhere.”

“And we’ve got a hiker’s map,” Neagley said. “Maybe it’s not even on a regular road map.”

“So that truck passed through for a reason,” Reacher said. “Not by accident, not for the fun of it.”

“Those were the guys,” Neagley said.

Reacher nodded. “They were on their reconnaissance run.”

“I agree,” Neagley said. “But did they like what they saw?”

Reacher closed his eyes. What did they see ? They saw a tiny town with no safe hiding places. A helicopter landing site just fifty yards from the church. And a black SUV that looked a little like an official Secret Service vehicle already parked on the road, big and obvious. With Colorado plates, and Denver was probably the nearest Secret Service Field Office.