One Shot

straight back to Franklin’s office and ran up the outside staircase and found Franklin sitting at his desk. The lights were off and his face was bathed in the glow from his computer screen. He was staring at it blankly, like it was telling him nothing. Reacher broke the news about Rosemary Barr. Franklin went very still and glanced at the door. Then the window.
    “We were right here,” he said.
    Reacher nodded. “Three of us. You, me, and Helen.”
    “I didn’t hear anything.”
    “Me either,” Reacher said. “They’re really good.”
    “What are they going to do to her?”
    “They’re going to make her give evidence against her brother. Some kind of a made-up story.”
    “Will they hurt her?”
    “That depends on how fast she caves.”
    “She’s not going to cave,” Yanni said. “Not in a million years. Don’t you see that? She’s totally dedicated to clearing her brother’s name.”
    “Then they’re going to hurt her.”
    “Where is she?” Franklin asked Reacher. “Best guess?”
    “Wherever they are,” Reacher said. “But I don’t know where that is.”

    She was in the upstairs living room, taped to a chair. The Zec was staring at her. He was fascinated by women. Once he had gone twenty-seven years without seeing one. The penal battalion he had joined in 1943 had had a few, but they were a small minority and they died fast. And then after the Great Patriotic War had been won, his nightmare progress through the Gulag had begun. In 1949 he had seen a woman peasant near the White Sea Canal. She was a stooped and bulky old crone two hundred yards away in a beet field. Then nothing, until in 1976 he saw a nurse riding a troika sled through the frozen wastes of Siberia. He was a quarryman then. He had come up out of the hole with a hundred other
zec
s and was walking home in a long ragged column down a long straight road. The nurse’s sled was approaching on another road that ran at right angles. The land was flat and featureless and covered with snow. The
zec
s could see forever. They stood and watched the nurse drive a whole mile. Then they turned their heads as one as she passed through the crossroads and watched her through another mile. The guards denied them food that night as punishment for the unauthorized halt. Four men died, but the Zec didn’t.
    “Are you comfortable?” he asked.
    Rosemary Barr said nothing. The one called Chenko had returned her shoe. He had crouched in front of her and fitted it to her foot like a store clerk. Then he had backed away and sat down next to the one called Vladimir, on the sofa. The one called Sokolov had stayed downstairs in a room full of surveillance equipment. The one called Linsky was pacing the room, white with pain. He had something wrong with his back.
    “When the Zec speaks, you should answer,” the one called Vladimir said.
    Rosemary looked away. She was afraid of Vladimir. More so than the others. Vladimir was huge, and he gave off an air of depravity, like a smell.
    “Does she understand her position?” Linsky asked. The Zec smiled at him, and Linsky smiled back. It was a private joke between them. Any claim to rights or humane treatment in the camps was always met with a question:
Do you understand your position?
The question was always followed by a statement:
You don’t
have
a position. You are
nothing
to the Motherland.
The first time Linsky had heard the question he had been about to reply, but the Zec had hauled him away. By that point the Zec had eighteen years under his belt, and the intervention was uncharacteristic. But clearly he had felt something for the raw youngster. He had taken the kid under his wing. They had been together ever since, through a long succession of locations neither of them could name. Many books had been written about the Gulag, and documents had been discovered, and maps had been made, but the irony was that those who had participated had no idea where they had been. Nobody had told them. A camp was a camp, with wire, huts, endless forest, endless tundra, endless work. What difference did a name make?
    Linsky had been a soldier and a thief. In the west of Europe or in America he would have served time, two years here, three years there, but during the Soviet Union, stealing was an ideological transgression. It showed an uneducated and antisocial preference for private property. Such a preference was answered with a swift and permanent removal from civilized society. In Linsky’s case the