'No safe opportunity yet. That's the only possible reason. He's going to be cautious with you. More so than with the others. The lawyer was a patsy, Peterson was a b.u.mpkin, and Salter was a harmless old lady. You're different.'

'Not so very different.'

'You need to pull back to Rapid City. Hole up somewhere and talk to the FBI.'

'I don't have a vehicle.'

'You have a telephone. You're talking on it right now. Put it down and then call the FBI. Keep your guard up until they get there.'

He didn't answer.

She asked, 'Are you going to do that?'

'I doubt it.'

'You weren't responsible for those people, you know.'

'Says who?'

'All of this would have happened just the same without you. It's a million-to-one chance you were there at all.'

'Peterson was a nice guy. And a good cop. He wanted to be a better cop. He was one of those guys who knew enough to know he didn't know everything. I liked him.'

Susan said nothing.

'I liked Mrs Salter, too. She was a n.o.ble old bird.'

'You need to get out of there. You're outnumbered. Plato won't come alone.'

'I hope he doesn't.'

'It's dangerous.'

Reacher said, 'For him.'

Susan said, 'Do you remember as a kid, watching a movie about a creature in a lagoon?'

'Is that thing still in my file?'

'In the back index.'

'And you read it?'

'I was interested.'

'They got it wrong. And they took away my blade, which p.i.s.sed me off.'

'How did they get it wrong?'

'I wasn't some kind of a genetic freak. I was born as scared as anyone. Maybe more so. I lay awake crying with the best of them. But I got tired of it. I trained myself out of it. An act of will. I re-routed fear into aggression. It was easy enough to do.'

'At the age of six?'

'No, I was an old hand by then. I was four when I started. I had the job done by the time I was five.'

'Is that what you're doing now? Re-routing guilt into aggression?'

'I took an oath. Same as you did. All enemies, foreign and domestic. Looks like I've got one of each here. Plato, and whoever his bent cop is.'

'Your oath lapsed.'

'It never lapses.'

She asked, 'How does a six-year-old have his own switchblade anyway?'

'Didn't you have one?'

'Of course not.'

'Do you have one now?'

'No.'

'You should get one.'

She said, 'And you should go to Rapid City and do this thing properly.'

'We're short of time.'

'You have no legal standing.'

'So put another tag on my file. Or save them all some effort. Just Xerox it. Three copies, FBI, DEA, and the local South Dakota people. Send them out overnight.'

'You're not thinking straight. You're punishing yourself. You can't win them all. You don't have to win them all.'

'They put you in charge of the 110th?'

'And I'll stay in charge. As long as I want.'

'This time it was really important.'

'They're all important.'

'Not like this. I'm staring at a nice old lady with a hole in her head. She mattered more to me than being hungry.'

'Stop looking at her.'

Reacher looked down at the floor.

Susan said, 'You can't change the past.'

'I know.'

'You can't atone. And you don't need to, anyway. That guy deserved to be in a coma, maybe for ever.'

'Maybe.'

'Go to Rapid City.'

'No.'

'Then come to Virginia. We'll deal with this together.'

Reacher said nothing.

'Don't you want to come to Virginia?'

'Sure I do.'

'So do it.'

'I will. Tomorrow.'

'Do it now.'

'It's the middle of the night.'

'There was a question you used to ask me.'

'Was there?'

'You stopped asking it.'

'What was it?'

'You used to ask if I was married.'

'Are you?'

'No.'

Reacher looked up again. Janet Salter stared right back at him.

He said, 'I'll leave tomorrow.'

He hung up the phone.

Five minutes to two in the morning. Two hours to go.

CHAPTER FORTY

THREE HOURS INTO THE FLIGHT, AND P PLATO WAS GET TING TENSE. Unsurprisingly. His life was like a video game. One thing popped up at him after another. Each thing had to be dealt with efficiently and comprehensively. From the most important to the least. Not that even the least important thing was trivial. He spent fifteen hundred dollars a month on rubber bands alone. Just to bind up all the cash that he took to the bank. There were no small problems. And plenty of big ones. And his performance was judged not only on substance, but also on style. Drama was weakness. Especially for him.

The irony was that he had been large as a child. Until he was seven he was as big as or bigger than anyone else. At eight he was still fully compet.i.tive. At nine he was in the ballpark. Then he had stopped growing. No one knew why. No one knew if it was genetic, or a disease, or an environmental factor. Maybe mercury, or lead, or some other heavy metal. Certainly it was not a lack of food or proper care. His parents had always been present and competent. At first they had turned a blind eye. The a.s.sumption was that such a thing would correct itself. But it didn't. So first his father had turned away, and then his mother.

Now no one turned away.

His cell phone was switched on. Normal rules did not apply to him. It rang and he answered it. His man on the ground. Some fellow cop had found out too much and had been taken out. Plato didn't care. Collateral damage. Unimportant. Some other guy was sniffing around, too, and would have to be dealt with. An exmilitary cop. Plato didn't care about that, either. Unimportant. Not his problem.

But then, finally, the big news: the witness was dead.

Plato smiled.

He said, 'You just saved a life.'

Then he made a call of his own. Brooklyn, New York. He announced the news. The last obstacle had been removed. South Dakota was now definitively a trouble-free zone. The t.i.tle was impregnable. Absolutely guaranteed. The Russian agreed to wire the money immediately. Plato listened hard and imagined he heard the click of the mouse.

He smiled again.

A done deal.

He closed his phone and looked out his window. Seat 1A, the best on the plane. His plane. He looked down at America spread out below. Dark and ma.s.sive. Strings of lights. He checked his watch. Fifty-seven more minutes. Then, once again, and as always, show time. Another challenge. Another triumph.

Reacher went upstairs and found Janet Salter's bedroom. It was at the back of the house, directly above the library. It was a pleasant, fragrant room that smelled of talc.u.m powder and lavender. Its bathroom was directly above half of the kitchen. There was a medicine cabinet above the sink. In it was an array of basic toiletry items, plus the box of .38 ammunition, eighty-eight rounds remaining of the original hundred.

Reacher put the box in his coat pocket and closed the mirror. He went back down the stairs and stepped into the library and stood over Janet Salter and moved her book and one soft arm and took her gun out of her cardigan pocket. It was still fully loaded. It had not been fired. He put it in his own pocket and replaced the book and the arm and stepped away.

The cop who had killed the lawyer and the deputy chief and Mrs Salter sat in his car and stared out the windshield. He was in his designated position on the makeshift perimeter, personally responsible for the eighth of a mile of snow on his left and the eighth of a mile of snow on his right. Not that any escaper would use anything except the road, even in summer. In any season the terrain was too flat and featureless for concealment. The dogs would run him down in a minute. Going cross-country and hiding in ditches and culverts was strictly for the kind of old black and white chain-gang movie that gets shown late at night on the minor satellite channels. No, these days any sane fugitive would come straight down the road, strapped to the cha.s.sis of an empty delivery truck.

Not that there actually was a fugitive. Plato had been clear about that. There were all kinds of voids in the prison architecture. Overhead plenum chambers where ducts branched, underfloor matrices where pipes split. All kinds of inspection panels. All perfectly safe, because none of the voids actually led anywhere. But useful for purposes short of an actual break-out. A sandwich and a bottle to pee in, a guy could hold out ten or twelve hours.

Which would be enough.

The cop checked his guns. Habit. Instinct. First his official piece, in his holster, and then his other piece, in his pocket. Loaded. A round in the chamber, and fourteen more in the magazine.

He wouldn't need the fourteen in the magazine.

Reacher took one last careful tour through Janet Salter's house. He was fairly sure he wouldn't be coming back to it, and there were certain things he needed to fix in his mind. He looked at the front door, the back door, the bas.e.m.e.nt door, the kitchen, the hallway, the library, Janet Salter's position in it, and the book on her lap. Somewhere between five and eight minutes, he thought, for her to get as comfortable as she looked, given that she had been starting out from a state of extreme panic. It would have taken her that kind of time to relax, even in the safe and rea.s.suring company of a trusted figure like a town cop.