One Shot

removal had lasted from 1963 until civilized society had collapsed and Gorbachev had emptied the Gulag.
    “She understands her position,” the Zec said. “And next comes acceptance.”

    Franklin called Helen Rodin. Ten minutes later she was back in his office. She was still mad at Reacher. That was clear. But she was too worried about Rosemary Barr to make a big deal out of it. Franklin stayed at his desk, one eye on his computer screen. Helen and Ann Yanni sat together at a table. Reacher stared out the window. The sky was darkening.
    “We should call someone,” Helen said.
    “Like who?” Reacher asked.
    “My father. He’s the good guy.”
    Reacher turned around. “Suppose he is. What do we tell him? That we’ve got a missing person? He’ll just call the cops, because what else can he do? And if Emerson’s the bad guy, the cops will sit on it. Even if Emerson’s the good guy, the cops will sit on it just the same. Missing adults don’t get anyone very excited. Too many of them.”
    “But she’s integral to our case.”
    “Their case is about her brother. So the cops will figure it’s only natural she ran away. Her brother is a notorious criminal and she couldn’t stand the shame.”
    “But you saw her get kidnapped. You could tell them.”
    “I saw a shoe. That’s all I can tell anybody. And I’ve got no credibility here. I’ve been playing silly games for two days.”
    “So what do we do?”
    Reacher turned back to the window.
    “We take care of it ourselves,” he said.
    “How?”
    “All we need is a location. We work through the woman who was shot, we get names, we get some kind of a context, we get a place. Then we go there.”
    “When?” Yanni asked.
    “Twelve hours,” Reacher said. “Before dawn. They’ll be working on some kind of a timetable. They want to take care of me first, and then they want to start in on Rosemary Barr. We need to get to her before they run out of patience.”
    “But that means you’ll be showing up exactly when they’re expecting you.”
    Reacher said nothing.
    “It’s like walking into a trap,” Yanni said.
    Reacher didn’t answer that. Yanni turned to Franklin and said, “Tell us more about the woman who was shot.”
    “There’s nothing more to tell,” Franklin said. “I’ve been through everything forward and backward. She was very ordinary.”
    “Family?”
    “All of them are back East. Where she came from.”
    “Friends?”
    “Two, basically. A co-worker and a neighbor. Neither of them is interesting. Neither of them is a Russian, for instance.”
    Yanni turned back to Reacher. “So maybe you’re wrong. Maybe the third shot wasn’t the money shot.”
    “It must have been,” Reacher said. “Or why would he pause after it? He was double-checking he had a hit.”
    “He paused after the sixth, too. For good.”
    “He wouldn’t wait that long. It could have gone completely out of control by then. People could have been jumping all over each other.”
    “But they weren’t.”
    “He couldn’t have predicted that.”
    “I agree,” Franklin said. “A thing like that, you don’t do it with your first or your last shot.”
    Then his eyes lost focus. He stared at the wall, like he wasn’t seeing it.
    “Wait,” he said.
    He glanced at his screen.
    “Something I forgot,” he said.
    “What?” Reacher asked.
    “What you said about Rosemary Barr. Missing persons.”
    He turned back to his mouse and his keyboard and started clicking and typing. Then he hit his enter key and sat forward intently, like proximity would speed the process.
    “Last chance,” he said.
    Reacher knew from television commercials that computers operated at all kinds of gigahertz, which he assumed was pretty fast. But even so, Franklin’s screen stayed blank for a long, long time. There was a little graphic in the corner. It was rotating slowly. It implied a thorough and patient search through an infinite amount of data. It spun for minutes. Then it stopped. There was an electrostatic crackle from the monitor and the screen wiped down and redrew into a densely-printed document. Plain computer font. Reacher couldn’t read it from where he was.
    The office went quiet.
    Franklin looked up.
    “OK,” he said. “There you go. At last. Finally something that isn’t ordinary. Finally we catch a break.”
    “What?” Yanni said.
    “Oline Archer reported her husband missing two months ago.”

CHAPTER 15
    Franklin pushed his chair back to make space