weapons, working tools. Put three professionals together on any one day, and you’ll see last night’s pizza on one guy’s shirt, another guy won’t have shaved, the third guy will be wearing the awful old pants his buddies make jokes about behind his back. It’s possible you’ll see a new jacket once in a while, or a fresh gun, or new shoes, but the chances of seeing everything new all at once on three working professionals on the same day are so slim as to be absurd.
And their attitude betrayed them. Competent, but jumpy, uptight, hostile, rude, tense. Trained to some degree, but not practiced. Not experienced. They’d rehearsed the theory, and they were smart enough to avoid any gross errors, but they didn’t have the habituation of professionals. Therefore these three were some kind of amateurs. And they had kidnapped a brand-new FBI agent. Why? What the hell could a brand-new FBI agent have done to anybody? Reacher had no idea. And the brand-new FBI agent in question wasn’t saying. Just another component he couldn’t begin to figure. But not the biggest component. The biggest component he couldn’t begin to figure was why the hell he was still there.
He had no problem with how he had gotten grabbed up in the first place. Just a freak of chance had put him alongside Holly Johnson at the exact time the snatch was going down. He was comfortable with that. He understood freak chances. Life was built out of freak chances, however much people would like to pretend otherwise. And he never wasted time speculating about how things might have been different, if this and if that. Obviously if he’d been strolling on that particular Chicago street a minute earlier or a minute later, he’d have been right past that dry cleaner and never known a damn thing about all this. But he hadn’t been strolling a minute earlier or a minute later, and the freak chance had happened, and he wasn’t about to waste his time wondering where he would be now if it hadn’t.
But what he did need to pin down was why he was still there, just over fourteen hours later, according to the clock inside his head. He’d had two marginal chances and one cast-iron certainty of getting out. Right away, on the street, he could have made it. Probably. The possibility of collateral damage had stopped him. Then in the abandoned lot, getting into the white truck, he might have made it. Probably. Three against one, both times, but they were three amateurs against Jack Reacher, and he felt comfortable enough about those odds.
The cast-iron certainty was he could have been out of the cow barn, say an hour after the three guys returned from the gas station with the truck. He could have slipped the cuff again, climbed the wall and dropped down into the barnyard and been away. Just jogged over to the road and walked away and disappeared. Why hadn’t he done that?
He lay there in the huge inky blackness of relaxation and realized it was Holly that was keeping him there. He hadn’t bailed out because he couldn’t take the risk. The three guys could have panicked and wasted her and run. Reacher didn’t want that to happen. Holly was a smart, spirited woman. Sharp, impatient, confident, tough as hell. Attractive, in a shy, unforced sort of a way. Dark, slim, a lot of intelligence and energy. Great eyes. Eyes were Reacher’s thing. He was lost in a pair of pretty eyes.
But it wasn’t her eyes that were doing it to him. Not her looks. Or her intelligence or her personality. It was her knee. That’s what was doing it to him. Her guts and her dignity. The sight of a good-looking spirited woman cheerfully fighting an unaccustomed disability seemed like a brave and noble thing to Reacher. It made her his type of person. She was coping with it. She was doing it well. She wasn’t complaining. She wasn’t asking for his help. And because she wasn’t asking for it, she was going to get it.
10
FIVE-THIRTY TUESDAY MORNING FBI Special Agent Brogan was alone in the third-floor meeting room, using one of the newly installed phone lines for an early call to his girlfriend. Five-thirty in the morning is not the best time to deliver an apology for a broken date from the night before, but Brogan had been very busy, and he anticipated being busier still. So he made the call. He woke her and told her he had been tied up, and probably would be for the rest of the week. She was sleepy and annoyed, and made him repeat it all twice. Then she chose to interpret the message as a cowardly prelude to some kind of a brush-off. Brogan got annoyed in turn. He told her the Bureau had to come first. Surely she understood that? It was not the best point to be making to a sleepy annoyed woman at five-thirty in the morning. They had a short row and Brogan hung up, depressed.
His partner Milosevic was alone in his own office cubicle. Slumped in his chair, also depressed. His problem was a lack of imagination. It was his biggest weakness. McGrath had told him to trace Holly Johnson’s every move from noon yesterday. But he hadn’t come up with anything. He had seen her leaving the FBI building. Stepping out of the door, onto the street, forearm jammed into the curved metal clip of her hospital cane. He had seen her getting that far. But then the picture just went blank. He’d thought hard all night, and told McGrath nothing.
Five-forty, he went to the bathroom and got more coffee. Still miserable. He walked back to his desk. Sat down, lost in thought for a long time. Then he glanced at the heavy gold watch on his wrist. Checked the time. Smiled. Felt better. Thought some more. Checked his watch again. He nodded to himself. Now he could tell McGrath where Holly Johnson had gone at twelve o’clock yesterday.
SEVENTEEN HUNDRED AND two miles away, panic had set in. Numb shock had carried the carpenter through the first hours. It had made him weak and acquiescent. He had let the employer hustle him up the stairs and into the room. Then numb shock had made him waste his first hours, just sitting and staring. Then he had started up with a crazy optimism that this whole thing was some kind of bad Halloween joke. That made him waste his next hours convinced nothing was going to happen. But then, like prisoners everywhere locked up alone in the cold small hours of the night, all his defenses had stripped away and left him shaking and desperate with panic.
With half his time gone, he burst into frantic action. But he knew it was hopeless. The irony was crushing him. They had worked hard on this room. They had built it right. Dollar signs had danced in front of their eyes. They had cut no corners. They had left out all their usual shoddy carpenter’s tricks. Every single board was straight and tight. Every single nail was punched way down below the grain. There were no windows. The door was solid. It was hopeless. He spent an hour running around the room like a madman. He ran his rough palms over every square inch of every surface. Floor, ceiling, walls. It was the best job they had ever done. He ended up crouched in a corner, staring at his hands, crying.
“THE DRY CLEANER’S,” McGrath said. “That’s where she went.”
He was in the third-floor conference room. Head of the table, seven o’clock, Tuesday morning. Opening a fresh pack of cigarettes.
“She did?” Brogan said. “The dry cleaner’s?”
McGrath nodded.
“Tell him, Milo,” he said.
Milosevic smiled.
“I just remembered,” he said. “I’ve worked with her five weeks, right? Since she busted up her knee? Every Monday lunchtime, she takes in her cleaning. Picks up last week’s stuff. No reason for it to be any different yesterday.”
“OK,” Brogan said. “Which cleaner’s?”
Milosevic shook his head.
“Don’t know,” he said. “She always went on her own. I always offered to do it for her, but she said no, every time, five straight Mondays. OK if I helped her out on Bureau business, but she wasn’t about to have me running around after her cleaning. She’s a very independent type of a woman.”
“But she walked there, right?” McGrath said.
“Right,” Milosevic said. “She always walked. With maybe eight or nine things on hangers. So we’re safe to conclude the place she used is fairly near here.”
Brogan nodded. Smiled. They had some kind of a lead. He pulled the Yellow Pages over and opened it up to D.
“What sort of a radius are we giving it?” he said.
McGrath shrugged.
“Twenty minutes there, twenty minutes back,” he said. “That would be about the max, right? With that crutch,
