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The Hard Way

The Hard Way

Titel: The Hard Way Kostenlos Bücher Online Lesen
Autoren: Lee Child
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drove fast. The limit was posted at seventy miles an hour, but it was widely ignored. High eighties, low nineties seemed to be the norm. Lane discipline was good. Nobody passed on the inside. The highway exits all followed the same coherent grammar. Clear signs, plenty of warning, long deceleration lanes. Reacher had read that highway fatalities were low in Britain. Safety, through infrastructure.
    Pauling asked, “What’s Grange Farm going to be like?”
    “I don’t know,” Reacher said. “Technically in Old English a
grange
was a large barn for grain storage. Then later it became a word for the main building in a gentleman’s arable farm. So I guess we’re going to see a big house and a bunch of smaller outbuildings. Fields all around. Maybe a hundred acres. Kind of feudal.”
    “You know a lot.”
    “A lot of useless information,” Reacher said. “Supposed to fire my imagination.”
    “But you can’t get no satisfaction?”
    “None at all. I don’t like anything about this whole situation. It feels wrong.”
    “Because there are no good guys. Just bad guys and worse guys.”
    “They’re all equally terrible.”
    “The hard way,” Pauling said. “Sometimes things aren’t black and white.”
    Reacher said, “I can’t get past the feeling that I’m making a bad mistake.”

----

    England is a small country but East Anglia was a large empty part of it. In some ways it was like driving across the prairie states. Endless forward motion without much visible result. The little red Mini Cooper hummed along. The clock in Reacher’s head crawled around to ten in the evening. The last of the twilight disappeared. Beyond the bright ribbon of road was nothing but full darkness.
    They bypassed a town called Thetford. Much later they blew through a town called Fenchurch Saint Mary. The road narrowed and the streetlights disappeared. They saw a sign that said
Norwich 40 Miles.
So Reacher switched maps and they started hunting the turn down to Bishops Pargeter. The road signs were clear and helpful. But they were all written with the same size lettering and there seemed to be a maximum permitted length for a fingerpost. Which meant that the longer names were abbreviated. Reacher saw a sign to
B’sh’ps P’ter
flash by and they were two hundred yards past it before he figured out what it meant. So Pauling jammed to a stop in the lonely darkness and U-turned and went back. Paused a second and then turned off the main drag onto a much smaller road. It was narrow and winding and the surface was bad. Pitch dark beyond the headlight beams.
    “How far?” Pauling asked.
    Reacher spanned his finger and thumb on the map.
    “Maybe nine miles,” he said. The motoring atlas had showed nothing but a blank white triangle between two roads that fanned out south of the city of Norwich. The Ordnance Survey sheet showed the triangle to be filled with a tracery of minor tracks and speckled here and there with small settlements. He put his finger on the Bishops Pargeter crossroad. Then he looked out the car window.
    “This is pointless,” he said. “It’s too dark. We’re not even going to see the house, let alone who’s living in it.” He looked back at the map. It showed buildings about four miles ahead. One was labeled
PH.
He checked the legend in the corner of the sheet.
    “Public house,” he said. “A pub. Maybe an inn. We should get a room. Go out again at first light.”
    Pauling said, “Suits me, boss.”
    He realized she was tired. Travel, jet lag, unfamiliar roads, driving stress. “I’m sorry,” he said. “We overdid it. I should have planned better.”
    “No, this works,” she said. “We’re right on the spot for the morning. But how much farther?”
    “Four miles to the pub now, and then five more to Bishops Pargeter tomorrow.”
    “What time is it?”
    He smiled. “Ten forty-seven.”
    “So you can do it in multiple time zones.”
    “There’s a clock on the dashboard. I can see it from here. I’m practically sitting in your lap.”
    Eight minutes later they saw a glow in the distance that turned out to be the pub’s spotlit sign. It was swinging in a gentle night breeze on a high gallows.
The Bishop’s Arms.
There was a blacktopped parking lot with five cars in it and then a row of lit windows. The windows looked warm and inviting. Beyond the dark outline of the building there was absolutely nothing at all. Just endless flatness under a vast night sky.
    “Maybe it was a

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