Echo Burning

mile.
    “Not there,” he said. “But nearby. Think about it, from their point of view.”
    “I can’t,” she said. “I’m not like them.”
    “So pretend,” he said. “What were they?”
    “I don’t know.”
    “They were professionals. Quiet and unobtrusive. Like chameleons. Instinctively good at camouflage. Good at not being noticed. Put yourself in their shoes, Alice.”
    “I can’t,” she said again.
    “Think like them. Imagine. Get into it. Who are they? I saw them and thought they were a sales team. Rusty Greer thoughtthey were social workers. Apparently Al Eugene thought they were FBI agents. So think like them. Be them. Your strength is you look very normal and very ordinary. You’re white, and you look very middle-class, and you’ve got this Crown Victoria, which when it’s not all tricked up with radio antennas looks like an ordinary family sedan. The FBI con helped, but basically you looked harmless enough that Al Eugene felt safe to stop for you, but also somehow commanding enough that he also had to. Wanted to. So you’re ordinary, but you’re respectable and plausible. And businesslike.”
    “O.K.”
    “But now you’ve got a kid with you. So what are you now?”
    “What?”
    “Now you’re a normal, ordinary, respectable, plausible middle-class family.”
    “But there were three of them.”
    He was quiet a beat. Kept his eyes closed.
    “One of the men was an uncle,” he said. “You’re a middle-class family, on vacation together in your sedan. But you’re not a loud Disneyland type of family. You’re not in shorts and brightly colored T-shirts. You look quiet, maybe a little earnest. Maybe a little nerdy. Or maybe a little studious . Maybe you look like a school principal’s family. Or an accountant’s. You’re obviously from out of state, so you’re traveling. Where to? Ask yourself the same question they must have asked themselves. Where will you blend in? Where’s the safest place around here? Where would an earnest, studious, middle-class family go, with their six-and-a-half-year-old daughter? Where’s a proper, enlightening, educational kind of a place to take her? Even though she’s way too young and doesn’t care? Even though people laugh behind your back at how politically correct and cloyingly diligent you are?”
    “Old Fort Stockton,” Alice said.
    “Exactly. You show the kid the glorious history of the African-American soldiers, even though you’d have a heart attack if she grew up and wanted to date one. But you’re driving a Ford, not a BMW or a Cadillac. You’re sensible . Which means not rich, basically. Careful about your expenditure.You resent overpaying for something. Motels, just as much as cars. So you drive in from the north and you stay at a place far enough out to be reasonable. Not the dumps in the middle of nowhere. But on the first distant fringes of the Fort Stockton tourist area. Where the value is good.”
    He opened his eyes.
    “That’s where you would stay, Alice,” he said.
    “It is?”
    He nodded. “A place where they get plenty of earnest, striving, not-rich middle-class families on vacation. The sort of place that gets recommended in boring AAA magazines. A place where you fit right in. A place with lots of people exactly like you. A place where you won’t stand out in anybody’s memory for a second. And a place where you’re only thirty, thirty-five minutes from Pecos by a fast road.”
    Alice shrugged and nodded all at the same time.
    “Good theory, I guess,” she said. “Good logic. Question is, were they following the same logic?”
    “I hope so,” Reacher said. “Because we don’t have time for a big search. I don’t think we have much time for anything. I’m getting a bad feeling. I think she’s in real danger now.”
    Alice said nothing.
    “Maybe the others were supposed to call in regularly,” he said. “Maybe this third guy is about to panic.”
    “So it’s a hell of a gamble.”
    He said nothing.
    “Do the math,” she said. “A forty-five-mile radius gives you a circle over six thousand square miles in area. And you want to pick one tiny pinpoint out of it?”
    He was quiet again, another mile.
    Roll the dice, Reacher .
    “I think they were pretty smart and careful,” he said. “And their priorities were pretty obvious. They were looking at the same maps we are. So I think that’s how they’d have done it.”
    “But are you sure?”
    He shrugged.
    “Can’t ever be sure,” he