Bad Luck and Trouble

you’re talking about.”
    Reacher said, “Lamaison is dead.”
    There was a flash of hope in Dean’s eyes, just for a split second, hard to see in the darkness.
    “I threw him out of the helicopter,” Reacher said.
    Dean said nothing.
    “You like bird watching? Wait a day and drive a mile or two south and get up on the roof of your car. Two buzzards circling, it’s probably a snake-bit coyote. More than two, it’s Lamaison. Or Parker, or Lennox. They’re all out there somewhere.”
    “I don’t believe you.”
    Reacher said, “Show him, Karla.”
    Dixon pulled out the wallet she had taken from Lamaison’s pocket. Dean took it from her and turned to the light burning in his hallway. He spilled the contents into his palm and shuffled through them. Lamaison’s driver’s license, his credit cards, a New Age photo ID, his Social Security card.
    “Lamaison is dead,” Reacher said again.
    Dean put the stuff back in the wallet and handed it back to Dixon.
    “You got his wallet,” he said. “Doesn’t prove you got him.”
    “I can show you the pilot,” Reacher said. “He’s dead, too.”
    “He just landed.”
    “I just killed him.”
    “You’re crazy.”
    “And you’re off the hook.”
    Dean said nothing.
    “Take your time,” Reacher said. “Get used to it. But we need to know who’s coming, and when.”
    “Nobody’s coming.”
    “Someone has to be.”
    “That was never the deal.”
    “Wasn’t it?”
    “Tell me again,” Dean said. “Lamaison’s dead?”
    “He killed four of my friends,” Reacher said. “If he wasn’t dead, I sure as hell wouldn’t be standing here wasting time with you.”
    Dean nodded, slowly. He was getting used to it.
    “But I still don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said. “OK, I signed off on phony paperwork, I admit that, six hundred and fifty times, which is terrible, but that was all I did. There was never anything about me assembling units or showing anyone else how to do it.”
    “Who else knows how?”
    “It’s not difficult. It’s plug and play. It’s simple. It has to be. Soldiers are going to do it. No offense. I mean, in the field, at night, under stress.”
    “Simple for you.”
    “Relatively simple for anyone.”
    “Soldiers never do anything until they’re shown how.”
    “Sure, they’ll have training.”
    “From who?”
    “We’ll set up a course at Fort Irwin. I guess I’ll teach the first class.”
    “Lamaison knew that?”
    “It’s standard practice.”
    “So he pimped you out for a preview.”
    Dean just shook his head. “He didn’t. He didn’t say anything about a preview. And he could have. It wasn’t like I was in a position to refuse him anything.”
    “Nine hours,” Neagley said.
    “Another hundred and thirty thousand square miles,” Dixon said.
    A hundred thirty-three thousand five hundred thirty-five, Reacher thought, automatically. The increase alone was as big as most of California and more than half of Texas. The area of a circle was equal to pi times the radius squared, and it was the squared part that made it increase so fast.
    “They’re coming here,” he said. “They have to be.”
    Nobody answered.

    Dean led them inside. His house was a long low shack built from concrete and timber. The concrete had been left raw and was fading to a yellowed patina. The timber was stained dark brown. There was a big living room with Navajo rugs and worn furniture and a fireplace heaped with last winter’s ash. There were plenty of books in the room. CDs were piled everywhere. There was a stereo with vacuum tube amplifiers and horn speakers. Altogether the place looked exactly like a city refugee’s dream.
    Dean went to make coffee in the kitchen and Dixon said, “Nine hours twenty-six minutes.” Neagley and O’Donnell didn’t get the point, but Reacher did. Assuming three decimal places for pi and a speed of fifty for the truck, then nine hours and twenty-six minutes made the potential search area exactly seven hundred thousand square miles.
    “Mahmoud is cautious,” Reacher said. “He’s not going to buy a pig in a poke. Either it’s his money and he doesn’t want to waste it, or it’s someone else’s money and he doesn’t want to get his head cut off for screwing up. He’s coming.”
    “Dean says not.”
    “Dean says he wasn’t told in advance. There’s a difference.”
    Dean came back and served the coffee and nobody spoke for a quarter of an hour. Then Reacher turned to