hundred tiny points of blue light. Spent shot rattled and bounced down and ricocheted around the truck like hail. Then the sound of the gun faded into the hum of temporary deafness.
Reacher felt the slam of the door. The sliver of daylight cut off. He felt the rock of the vehicle as the three men climbed back into the cab. He felt the shake as the rough diesel caught. Then a forward lurch and a yaw to the left as the truck pulled back onto the highway.
FIRST THING REACHER heard as his hearing came back was a quiet keening as the air whistled out through the hundred pellet holes in the roof. It grew louder as the miles rolled by. A hundred high-pitched whistles, all grouped together a couple of semitones apart, fighting and warbling like some kind of demented birdsong.
“Insane, right?” Holly said.
“Me or them?” he said.
He nodded an apology. She nodded back and struggled up to a sitting position. Used both hands to straighten her knee. The holes in the roof were letting light through. Enough light that Reacher could see her face clearly. He could interpret her expression. He could see the flicker of pain. Like a blind coming down in her eyes, then snapping back up. He knelt and swept the spent pellets off the mattress. They rattled across the metal floor.
“Now you’ve got to get out,” she said. “You’ll get yourself killed soon.”
The highlights in her hair flashed under the random bright illumination.
“I mean it,” she said. “Qualified or not, I can’t let you stay.”
“I know you can’t,” he said.
He used his discarded shirt to sweep the pellets into a pile near the doors. Then he straightened the mattresses and lay back down. Rocked gently with the motion. Stared at the holes in the sheet metal above him. They were like a map of some distant galaxy.
“My father would do what it takes to get me back,” Holly said.
Talking was harder than it had been before. The drone of the motor and the rumble of the road were complicated by the high-pitched whistle from the roof. A full spectrum of noise. Holly lay down next to Reacher. She put her head next to his. Her hair fanned out and brushed his cheek and fell to his neck. She squirmed her hips and straightened her leg. There was still space between their bodies. The decorous V shape was still there. But the angle was a little tighter than it had been before.
“But what can he do?” Reacher said. “Talk me through it.”
“They’re going to make some kind of demand,” she said. “You know, do this or do that, or we hurt your girl.”
She spoke slowly and there was a tremor in her voice. Reacher let his hand drop into the space between them and found hers. He took it and squeezed gently.
“Doesn’t make any sense,” he said. “Think about it. What does your father do? He implements long-term policy, and he’s responsible for short-term readiness. Congress and the President and the Defense Secretary thrash out the long-term policy, right? So if the Joint Chairman tried to stand in their way, they’d just replace him. Especially if they know he’s under this kind of pressure, right?”
“What about short-term readiness?” she said.
“Same sort of a thing,” Reacher said. “He’s only chairman of a committee. The individual Chiefs of Staff are in there, too. Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines. If they’re all singing a different song from what your father is reporting upward, that’s not going to stay a secret for long, is it? They’ll just replace him. Take him out of the equation altogether.”
Holly turned her head. Looked straight at him.
“Are you sure?” she said. “Suppose these guys are working for Iraq or something? Suppose Saddam wants Kuwait again. But he doesn’t want another Desert Storm. So he has me kidnapped, and my father says sorry, can’t be done, for all kinds of invented reasons?”
Reacher shrugged.
“The answer’s right there in the words you used,” he said. “The reasons would be invented. Fact is, we could do Desert Storm again, if we had to. No problem. Everybody knows that. So if your father started denying it, everybody would know he was bullshitting, and everybody would know why. They’d just sideline him. The military is a tough place, Holly, no room for sentiment. If that’s the strategy these guys are pursuing, they’re wasting their time. It can’t work.”
She was quiet for a long moment.
“Then maybe this is about revenge,” she said slowly. “Maybe somebody is punishing him for something in the past. Maybe I’m going to Iraq. Maybe they want to make him apologize for Desert Storm. Or Panama, or Grenada, or lots of things.”
Reacher lay on his back and rocked with the motion. He could feel slight breaths of air stirring, because of the holes in the roof. He realized the truck was now a lot cooler, because of the new ventilation. Or because of his new mood.
“Too arcane,” he said. “You’d have to be a pretty acute analyst to blame the Joint Chairman for all that stuff. There’s a string of more obvious targets. Higher-profile people, right? The President, the Defense Secretary, Foreign Service people, field generals. If Baghdad was looking for a public humiliation, they’d pick somebody their people could identify, not some paper shuffler from the Pentagon.”
“So what the hell is this about?” Holly said.
Reacher shrugged again.
“Ultimately, nothing,” he said. “They haven’t thought it through properly. That’s what makes them so dangerous. They’re competent, but they’re stupid.”
THE TRUCK DRONED on another six hours. Another three hundred and fifty miles, according to Reacher’s guess. The inside temperature had cooled, but Reacher wasn’t trying to estimate their direction by the temperature anymore. The pellet holes in the roof had upset that calculation. He was relying on dead reckoning instead. A total of eight hundred miles from Chicago, he figured, and not in an easterly direction. That left a big spread of possibilities. He trawled clockwise around the map in his head. Could be in Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana. Could be in Texas, Oklahoma, the southwest corner of Kansas. Probably no farther west than that. Reacher’s mental map had brown shading there, showing the eastern slopes of the mountains, and the truck wasn’t laboring up any grades. Could be in Nebraska or South Dakota. Maybe he was going to pass right by Mount Rushmore, second time in his life. Could have kept on past Minneapolis, into North Dakota. Eight hundred miles from Chicago, anywhere along a giant arc drawn across the continent.
THE LIGHT COMING in through the pellet holes had been gone for hours when the truck slowed and steered right. Up a ramp. Holly stirred and turned her head. Looked straight at Reacher. Questions in her eyes. Reacher shrugged back and waited. The truck paused and swung a right. Cruised down a straight road, then hung a left, a right, and continued on straight, slower. Reacher sat up and found his shirt. Shrugged himself into it. Holly sat up.
“Another hideout,” she said. “This is a well-planned operation, Reacher.”
This time it was a horse farm. The truck bumped down a long track and turned. Backed up. Reacher heard one of the guys getting out. His door slammed. The truck lurched backward into another building. Reacher heard the exhaust noise beat against the walls. Holly smelled horse smell. The engine died. The other two guys got out. Reacher heard the three of them grouping at the rear of the truck. Their key slid into the lock. The door cracked open. The shotgun poked in through the gap. This time, not pointing upward. Pointing level.
“Out,” Loder called. “The bitch first. On its own.”
Holly froze. Then she shrugged at Reacher and slid across the mattresses. The door snapped wide open and two pairs of hands seized her and dragged her out. The driver moved into view, aiming the shotgun straight in at Reacher. His finger was tight on the trigger.
“Do something, asshole,” he said. “Please, just give me a damn excuse.”
Reacher stared at him. Waited five long minutes. Then the shotgun jabbed forward. A Glock appeared next to it. Loder gestured. Reacher moved slowly forward toward the two muzzles. Loder leaned in and snapped a handcuff onto his wrist. Looped the chain into the free half and locked it. Used the chain to drag him out of the truck by the arm. They were in a horse barn. It was a wooden structure. Much smaller than the cow barn at their previous
