Running Blind

do we call him?”

“What?”

“A very, very clever guy. Once might have been luck. Twice, he’s damn good.”

“So?”

“Then he did it again, with Stanley. Now what do we call him?”

“A very, very, very clever guy?”

Reacher nodded. “Exactly.”

“So?”

“So that’s the clue. We’re looking for a very, very, very clever guy.”

“I think we know that already.”

Reacher shook his head. “I don’t think you do. You’re not factoring it in.”

“In what sense?”

“You think about it. I’m only an errand boy. You Bureau people can do all the hard work.”

The stewardess came out of the galley with the breakfast trolley. It was first class, so the food was reasonable. Reacher smelled bacon and egg and sausage. Strong coffee. He flipped his tray open. The cabin was half-empty, so he got the girl to give him two breakfasts. Two airline meals made for a pleasant snack. She caught on quick and kept his coffee cup full.

“How aren’t we factoring it in?” Harper asked.

“Figure it out for yourself,” Reacher said. “I’m not in a helpful mood.”

“Is it that he’s not a soldier?”

He turned to stare at her. “That’s great. We agree he’s a really smart guy, and so you say well, then he’s obviously not a soldier. Thanks a bunch, Harper.”

She looked away, embarrassed. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it like that. I just can’t see how we’re not factoring it in.”

He said nothing in reply. Just drained his coffee and climbed over her legs to get to the bathroom. When he got back, she was still looking contrite.

“Tell me,” she said.

“No.”

“You should, Reacher. Blake’s going to ask me about your attitude.”

“My attitude? Tell him my attitude is if a hair on Jodie’s head gets hurt, I’ll tear his legs off and beat him to death with them.”

She nodded. “You really mean that, right?”

He nodded back. “You bet your ass I do.”

“That’s what I don’t understand. Why aren’t you feeling a little bit of the same way about these women? You liked Amy Callan, right? Not the same way as Jodie, but you liked her.”

“I don’t understand you, either. Blake wanted to use you like a hooker, and you’re acting like he’s still your best buddy.”

She shrugged. “He was desperate. He gets like that. He’s under a lot of stress. He gets a case like this, he’s just desperate to crack it.”

“And you admire that?”

She nodded. “Sure I do. I admire dedication.”

“But you don’t share it. Or you wouldn’t have said no to him. You’d have seduced me on camera, for the good of the cause. So maybe it’s you who doesn’t care enough about these women.”

She was quiet for a spell. “It was immoral. It annoyed me.”

He nodded. “And threatening Jodie was immoral, too. It annoyed me.”

“But I’m not letting my annoyance get in the way of justice.”

“Well, I am. And if you don’t like that, tough shit.”

THEY DIDN’T SPEAK again, all the way to Seattle. Five hours, without a word. Reacher was comfortable enough with that. He was not a compulsively sociable guy. He was happier not talking. He didn’t see anything odd about it. There was no strain involved. He just sat there, not talking, like he was making the journey on his own.

Harper was having more trouble with it. He could see she was worried about it. She was like most people. Put her alongside somebody she was acquainted with, she felt she had to be conversing. For her, it was unnatural not to be. But he didn’t relent. Five hours, without a single word.

Those five hours were reduced to two by the West Coast clocks. It was still about breakfast time when they landed. The Sea-Tac terminals were filled with people starting out on their day. The arrivals hall had the usual echelon of drivers holding placards up. There was one guy in a dark suit, striped tie, short hair. He had no placard, but he was their guy. He might as well have had FBI tattooed across his forehead.

“Lisa Harper?” he said. “I’m from the Seattle Field Office.”

They shook hands.

“This is Reacher,” she said.

The Seattle agent ignored him completely. Reacher smiled inside. Touche, he thought. But then the guy might have ignored him anyway even if they were best buddies, because he was pretty much preoccupied with paying a whole lot of attention to what was under Harper’s shirt.

“We’re flying to Spokane,” he said. “Air taxi company owes us a few favors.”

He had a Bureau car parked in the tow lane. He used it to drive a mile around the perimeter road to General Aviation, which was five acres of fenced tarmac filled with parked planes, all of them tiny, one and two engines. There was a cluster of huts with low-budget signs advertising transportation and flying lessons. A guy met them outside one of the huts. He wore a generic pilot’s uniform and led them toward a clean white six-seat Cessna. It was a medium-sized walk across the apron. Fall in the Northwest had brighter light than in D.C., but it was just as cold.

The interior of the plane was about the same size Lamarr’s Buick had been, and a whole lot more spartan. But it looked clean and well maintained, and the engines started first touch on the button. It taxied out to the runway with the same sensation of tiny size Reacher had felt in the Lear at McGuire. It lined up behind a 747 bound for Tokyo the way a mouse lines up behind an elephant. Then it wound itself up and was off the ground in seconds, wheeling due east, settling to a noisy cruise a thousand feet above the ground.

The airspeed indicator showed more than a hundred and twenty knots, and the plane flew on for two whole hours. The seat was cramped and uncomfortable, and Reacher started wishing he’d thought of a better way to waste his time. He was going to spend fourteen hours in the air, all in one day. Maybe he should have stayed and worked on the files with Lamarr. He imagined a quiet room somewhere, like a library, a stack of papers, a leather chair. Then he pictured Lamarr herself and glanced across at Harper and figured he’d maybe taken the right option after all.

The airfield at Spokane was a modest, modern place, larger than he had expected. There was a Bureau car waiting on the tarmac, identifiable even from a thousand feet up, a clean dark sedan with a man in a suit leaning on the fender.

“From the Spokane satellite office,” the Seattle guy said.

The car rolled over to where the plane parked and they were on the road within twenty seconds of the pilot shutting down. The local guy had the destination address written on a pad fixed to his windshield with a rubber suction cup. He seemed to know where the place was. He drove ten miles east toward the Idaho panhandle and turned north on a narrow road into the hills. The terrain was moderate, but there were giant mountains in the middle distance. Snow gleamed on the peaks. The road had a building every mile or so, separated by thick forest and broad meadow. The population density was not encouraging.

The address itself might have been the main house of an old cattle ranch, sold off long ago and refurbished by somebody looking for the rural dream but unwilling to forget the aesthetics of the city. It was boxed into a small lot by new ranch fencing. Beyond the fencing was grazing land, and inside the fencing the same grass had been fed and mowed into a fine lawn. There were trees on the perimeter, contorted by the wind. There was a small barn with garage doors punched into the side and a path veering off from the driveway to the front door. The whole structure stood close to the road and close to its own fencing, like a suburban house standing close to its neighbors, but this