Running Blind

“Seattle?” Reacher said. “I thought we were going to Quantico.”

Harper felt behind her for the seat-belt buckle and shook her head. “First we’re going to the scene. Blake thought it could be useful. We saw the place two days ago. We can give him some direct before-and-after comparisons. He thinks it’s worth a try. He’s pretty desperate.”

Reacher nodded. “How’s Lamarr taking it?”

Harper shrugged. “She’s not falling apart. But she’s real tense. She wants to take complete control of everything. But she won’t join us out there. Still won’t fly.”

The plane was taxiing, swinging wide circles across the tarmac on its way to the takeoff line. The engines were whining up to pitch. There was vibration in the cabin.

“Flying’s OK,” Reacher said.

Harper nodded. “I know, crashing is the problem.”

“Hardly ever happens, statistically.”

“Like a Powerball win. But somebody always gets lucky.”

“Hell of a thing, not flying. A country this size, it’s kind of limiting, isn’t it? Especially for a federal agent. I’m surprised they let her get away with it.”

She shrugged again. “It’s a known quantity. They work around it.”

The plane swung onto the runway and stopped hard against the brakes. The engine noise built louder and the plane rolled forward, gently at first, then harder, accelerating all the way. It came up off the ground with no sensation at all and the wheels whined up into their bays and the ground tilted sharply below them.

“Five hours to Seattle,” Harper said. “All over again.”

“Did you think about the geography?” Reacher asked. “Spokane is the fourth corner, right?”

She nodded. “Eleven potential locations now, all random, and he takes the four farthest away for his first four hits. The extremities of the cluster.”

“But why?”

She made a face. “Demonstrating his reach?”

He nodded. “And his speed, I guess. Maybe that’s why he abandoned the interval. To demonstrate his efficiency. He was in San Diego, then he’s in Spokane a couple of days later, checking out a new target.”

“He’s a cool customer.”

Reacher nodded vaguely. “That’s for damn sure. He leaves an immaculate scene in San Diego, then he drives north like a madman and leaves what I bet is another immaculate scene in Spokane. A cool, cool customer. I wonder who the hell he is?”

Harper smiled, briefly and grimly. “We all wonder who the hell he is, Reacher. The trick is to find out.”

YOU’RE A GENIUS, is who you are. An absolute genius, a prodigy, a superhuman talent. Four down! One, two, three, four down. And the fourth was the best of all. Alison Lamarr herself! You go over and over it, replaying it like a video in your head, checking it, testing it, examining it. But also savoring it. Because it was the best yet. The most fun, the most satisfaction. The most impact. The look on her face as she opened the door! The dawning recognition, the surprise, the welcome!

There were no mistakes. Not a single one. It was an immaculate performance, from the beginning to the end. You replay your actions in minute detail. You touched nothing, left nothing behind. You brought nothing to her house except your still presence and your quiet voice. The terrain helped, of course, isolated in the countryside, nobody for miles around. It made it a real safe operation. Maybe you should have had more fun with her. You could have made her sing. Or dance! You could have spent longer with her. Nobody could have heard anything.

But you didn’t, because patterns are important. Patterns protect you. You practice, you rehearse in your mind, you rely on the familiar. You designed the pattern for the worst case, which was probably the Stanley bitch in her awful little subdivision down in San Diego. Neighbors all over the place! Little cardboard houses all crowded on top of each other! Stick to the pattern, that’s the key. And keep on thinking. Think, think, think. Plan ahead. Keep on planning. You’ve done number four, and sure, you’re entitled to replay it over and over, to enjoy it for a spell, to savor it, but then you have to just put it away and close the door on it and prepare for number five.

THE FOOD ON the plane was appropriate for a flight that left halfway between lunch and dinner and was crossing all the time zones the continent had to offer. The only sure thing was it wasn’t breakfast. Most of it was a sweet pastry envelope with ham and cheese inside. Harper wasn’t hungry, so Reacher ate hers along with his own. Then he fueled up on coffee and fell back to thinking. Mostly he thought about Jodie. But do we want each other’s lives? First, define your life. Hers was easy enough to pin down, he guessed. Lawyer, owner, resident, lover, lover of fifties jazz, lover of modern art. A person who wanted to be settled, precisely because she knew what it was like to be rootless. If anybody in the whole world should live on the fourth floor of an old Broadway building with museums and galleries and cellar clubs all around her, it was Jodie.

But what about him? What made him happy? Being with her, obviously. There was no doubt about that. No doubt at all. He recalled the day in June he had walked back into her life. Just recalling it re-created the exact second he laid eyes on her and understood who she was. He had felt a flood of feeling as powerful as an electric shock. It buzzed through him. He was feeling it again, just because he was thinking about it. It was something he had rarely felt before.

Rarely, but not never. He had felt the same thing on random days since he left the Army. He remembered stepping off buses in towns he had never heard of in states he had never visited. He remembered the feel of sun on his back and dust at his feet, long roads stretching out straight and endless in front of him. He remembered peeling crumpled dollar bills off his roll at lonely motel desks, the feel of old brass keys, the musty smell of cheap rooms, the creak of springs as he dropped down on anonymous beds. Cheerful curious waitresses in old diners. Ten-minute conversations with drivers who stopped to pick him up, tiny random slices of contact between two of the planet’s teeming billions. The drifter’s life. Its charm was a big part of him, and he missed it when he was stuck in Garrison or holed up in the city with Jodie. He missed it bad. Real bad. About as bad as he was missing her right now.

“Making progress?” Harper asked him.

“What?” he said.

“You were thinking hard. Going all misty on me.”

“Was I?”

“So what were you thinking about?”

He shrugged. “Rocks and hard places.”

She stared at him. “Well, that’s not going to get us anywhere. So think about something else, OK?”

“OK,” he said.

He looked away and tried to put Jodie out of his mind. Tried to think about something else.

“Surveillance,” he said suddenly.

“What about surveillance?”

“We’re assuming the guy watches the houses first, aren’t we? At least a full day? He might have already been hiding out somewhere, right when we were there.”

She shivered. “Creepy. But so what?”

“So you should check motel registers, canvass the neighborhood. Follow up. That’s how you’re going to do this, by working. Not by trying to do magic five floors underground in Virginia.”

“There was no neighborhood. You saw the place. We’ve got nothing to work on. I keep on telling you that.”

“And I keep on telling you there’s always something to work on.”

“Yeah, yeah, he’s very smart, the paint, the geography, the quiet scenes.”

“Exactly. I’m not kidding. Those four things will lead you to him, sure as anything. Did Blake go to Spokane?”

She nodded. “We’re meeting him at the scene.”

“So he’s going to have to do what I tell him, or I’m not sticking around.”

“Don’t push it, Reacher. You’re Army liaison, not an investigator. And he’s pretty desperate. He can make you stick around.”