FIVE

PETERSON LED REACHER OUT INTO THE FREEZING NIGHT AND asked if he was hungry. Reacher said yes, he was starving. So Peterson drove to a chain restaurant next to a gas station on the main route out to the highway. His car was a standard police specification Ford Crown Victoria, with winter tyres on the front and chains on the back. Inside it smelled of heat and rubber and hamburger grease and warm circuit boards. Outside it had nearly stopped snowing.

‘Getting too cold to snow,’ Peterson said. Which seemed to be true. The night sky had partially cleared and a vast frigid bowl of arctic air had clamped down. It struck through Reacher’s inadequate clothing and set him shivering again on the short walk through the restaurant lot.

He said, ‘I thought there was supposed to be a big storm coming.’

Peterson said, ‘There are two big storms coming. This is what happens. They’re pushing cold air ahead of them.’

‘How long before they get here?’

‘Soon enough.’

‘And then it’s going to warm up?’

‘Just a little. Enough to let it snow.’

‘Good. I’ll take snow over cold.’

Peterson said, ‘You think this is cold?’

‘It ain’t warm.’

‘This is nothing.’

‘I know,’ Reacher said. ‘I spent a winter in Korea. Colder than this.’

‘But?’

‘The army gave me a decent coat.’

‘And?’

‘At least Korea was interesting.’ Which needled Peterson a little. The restaurant was empty and looked ready to close up. But they went in anyway. They took a table for two, a thirty-inch square of laminate that looked undersized between them.

Peterson said, ‘The town of Bolton is plenty interesting.’

‘The dead guy?’

‘Yes,’ Peterson said. Then he paused. ‘What dead guy?’

Reacher smiled. ‘Too late to take it back.’

‘Don’t tell me Chief Holland told you.’

‘No. But I was in his office a long time.’

‘Alone?’

‘Not for a minute.’

‘But he let you see the photographs?’

‘He tried hard not to. But your cleaning staff did a good job on his window.’

‘You saw them all?’

‘I couldn’t tell if the guy was dead or unconscious.’

‘So you suckered me with that jab about Korea.’

‘I like to know things. I’m hungry for knowledge.’

A waitress came by, a tired woman in her forties wearing sneakers under a uniform that featured a knotted necktie over a khaki shirt. Peterson ordered pot roast. Reacher followed his lead, and asked for coffee to drink.

Peterson asked, ‘How long were you in the army?’

‘Thirteen years.’

‘And you were an MP?’

Reacher nodded.

‘With medical training?’

‘You’ve been talking to the bus passengers.’

‘And the driver.’

‘You’ve been checking me out.’

‘Of course I have. Like crazy. What else do you think I was doing?’

‘And you want me in your house tonight.’

‘You got a better place to go?’

‘Where you can keep an eye on me.’

‘If you say so.’

‘Why?’

‘There are reasons.’

‘Want to tell me what they are?’

‘Just because you’re hungry for knowledge?’

‘I guess.’

‘All I’ll say is right now we need to know who’s coming and going.’

Peterson said nothing more, and a minute later dinner arrived. Plates piled high, mashed potatoes, plenty of gravy. The coffee was an hour old, and it had suffered in terms of taste but gained in terms of strength.

Peterson asked, ‘What exactly did you do in the MPs?’

Reacher said, ‘Whatever they told me to.’

‘Serious crimes?’

‘Sometimes.’

‘Homicides?’

‘Everything from attempted to multiple.’

‘How much medical training did you get?’

‘Worried about the food here?’

‘I like to know things too.’

‘I didn’t get much medical training, really. I was trying to make the old folks feel better, that’s all.’

‘They spoke well of you.’

‘Don’t trust them. They don’t know me.’

Peterson didn’t reply.

Reacher asked, ‘Where was the dead guy found? Where the police car was blocking the side street?’

‘No. That was different. The dead guy was somewhere else.’

‘He wasn’t killed there.’

‘How do you know?’

‘No blood in the snow. Hit someone hard enough in the head to kill them, the scalp splits. It’s inevitable. And scalps bleed like crazy. There should have been a pool of blood a yard across.’

Peterson ate in silence for a minute. Then he asked: ‘Where do you live?’

Which was a difficult question. Not for Reacher himself. There was a simple answer. He lived nowhere, and always had. He had been born the son of a serving military officer, in a Berlin infirmary, and since the day he had been carried out of it swaddled in blankets he had been dragged all over the world, through an endless blur of military bases and cheap off-post accommodations, and then he had joined up himself and lived the same way on his own account. Four years at West Point was his longest period of residential stability, and he had enjoyed neither West Point nor stability. Now that he was out of the service, he continued the transience. It was all he knew and it was a habit he couldn’t break.

Not that he had ever really tried.

He said, ‘I’m a nomad.’

Peterson said, ‘Nomads have animals. They move around to find pasture. That’s the definition.’

‘OK, I’m a nomad without the animals part.’

‘You’re a bum.’

‘Possibly.’

‘You got no bags.’

‘You got a problem with that?’

‘It’s weird behaviour. Cops don’t like weird behaviour.’

‘Why is it weirder to move around than spend every day in the same place?’

Peterson was quiet for a spell and then he said, ‘Everyone has possessions.’

‘I’ve got no use for them. Travel light, travel far.’

Peterson didn’t answer.

Reacher said, ‘Whatever, I’m no concern of yours. I never heard of Bolton before. If the bus driver hadn’t twitched I’d have been at Mount Rushmore tonight.’

Peterson nodded, reluctantly.

‘Can’t argue with that,’ he said.

Five minutes to ten in the evening.

Fifty-four hours to go.

Seventeen hundred miles to the south, inside the walled compound a hundred miles from Mexico City, Plato was eating too, a rib eye steak flown in all the way from Argentina. Nearly eleven in the evening local time. A late dinner. Plato was dressed in chinos and a white button-down shirt and black leather penny loafer shoes, all from the Brooks Brothers’ boys’ collection. The shoes and the clothes fit very well, but he looked odd in them. They were made for fat white middle-class American children, and Plato was old and brown and squat and had a shaved bullet head. But it was important to him to be able to buy clothes that fit right out of the box. Made-to-measure was obviously out of the question. Tailors would wield the tape and go quiet and then call out small numbers with studied and artificial neutrality. Alteration of off-the-rack items was just as bad. Visits from nervous local seamstresses and the furtive disposal of lengths of surplus fabric upset him mightily.

He put down his knife and his fork and dabbed his lips with a large white napkin. He picked up his cell phone and hit the green button twice, to return the last call he had received. When it was answered he said, ‘We don’t need to wait. Send the guy in and hit the witness.’

The man in the city villa asked, ‘When?’

‘As soon as would be prudent.’

‘OK.’

‘And hit the lawyer, too. To break the chain.’

‘OK.’

‘And make sure those idiots know they owe me big.’

‘OK.’

‘And tell them they better not bother me with this kind of shit ever again.’

Halfway through the pot roast Reacher asked, ‘So why was that street blocked off?’

Peterson said, ‘Maybe there was a power line down.’

‘I hope not. Because that would be a strange sense of priorities. You leave twenty seniors freezing on the highway for an hour to guard a power line on a side street?’

‘Maybe there was a fender bender.’

‘Same answer.’

‘Does it matter? You were already on your way into town by that point.’

‘That car had been there two hours or more. Its tracks were full of snow. But you told us no one was available.’

‘Which was true. That officer wasn’t available. He was doing a job.’

‘What job?’

‘None of your business.’

‘How big is your department?’

‘Big enough.’

‘And they were all busy?’

‘Correct.’

‘How many of them were busy sitting around doing nothing in parked cars?’

‘You got concerns, I suggest you move here and start paying taxes and then talk to the mayor or Chief Holland.’

‘I could have caught a chill.’

‘But you didn’t.’

‘Too early to say.’

They went back to eating. Until Peterson’s cell phone rang. He answered and listened and hung up and pushed his plate to one side.

‘Got to go,’ he said. ‘You wait here.’

‘I can’t,’ Reacher said. ‘This place is closing up. It’s ten o’clock. The waitress wants us out of here. She wants to go home.’

Peterson said nothing.

Reacher said, ‘I can’t walk. I don’t know where I’m supposed to go and it’s too cold to walk anyway.’

Peterson said nothing.

Reacher said, ‘I’ll stay in the car. Just ignore me.’

‘OK,’ Peterson said, but he didn’t look happy about it. Reacher left a twenty dollar bill on the table. The waitress smiled at him. Which she should, Reacher thought. Two pot roasts and a cup of coffee at South Dakota prices, he was leaving her a sixty per cent tip. Or maybe it was all tip, if Bolton was one of those towns where cops ate for free.

The Crown Vic was still faintly warm inside. Peterson hit the gas and the chains bit down and the car pushed through the snow on the ground. There was no other traffic except for snow-ploughs taking advantage of the lull in the fall. Reacher had a problem with snowploughs. Not the machines themselves, but the compound word. A plough turned earth over and left it in place. Snowploughs didn’t do that with snow. Snowploughs were more properly bulldozers. But whatever, Peterson overtook them all, didn’t pause at corners, didn’t yield, didn’t wait for green lights.

Reacher asked, ‘Where are we going?’

‘Western suburbs.’

‘Why?’

‘Intruders.’

‘In a house?’

‘On the street. It’s a Neighbourhood Watch thing.’ No further explanation. Peterson just drove, hunched forward over the wheel, tense and anxious. Reacher sprawled in the seat beside him, wondering what kind of intruders could get a police department’s deputy chief to respond so urgently to a busybody’s call.

Seventeen hundred miles south the man in the walled Mexico City villa dialled long distance to the United States. His final task of the day. Eleven o’clock local time, ten o’clock Central Time in the big country to the north. The call was answered and the man in the villa relayed Plato’s instructions, slowly and precisely. No room for misunderstanding. No room for error. He waited for confirmation and then he hung up. He didn’t call Plato back. No point. Plato didn’t understand the concept of confirmation. For Plato, obedience followed command the same way night followed day. It was inevitable. The only way it wouldn’t happen was if the world had stopped spinning on its axis.