The Hard Way

exactly what they want. So they’ll get home OK.”
    “Sisters,” Pauling said. “This whole thing has been about the loyalty of sisters. Patti Joseph, Dee Marie Graziano, Susan Jackson.”
    Reacher drove on. Said nothing.
    “Unbelievable,” Pauling said. “We saw Kate and Jade this morning.”
    “Setting out with their hoes,” Reacher said. “Starting out on their new lives.”
    Then he accelerated a little, because the road was widening and straightening for the bypass around the town called Thetford.

----

    John Gregory was hitting the gas, too. He was at the wheel of a rented dark green seven-seat Toyota Land Cruiser sports utility vehicle. Edward Lane was next to him in the front passenger seat. Kowalski and Addison and Carter Groom were shoulder to shoulder on the rear bench. Burke and Perez were on the jump seats way in back. They were joining the M-11 at its southern tip, having blasted straight through central London to the northeast corner of the inner city.

CHAPTER 65
    THIS TIME IN full daylight Reacher saw the sign to
B’sh’ps P’ter
a hundred yards away and slowed well in advance and made the turn like he had been driving the back roads of Norfolk all his life. It was close to two o’clock in the afternoon. The sun was high and the wind was dropping. Blue skies, small white clouds, green fields. A perfect English late-summer day. Almost.
    Pauling said, “What are you going to tell them?”
    “That I’m sorry,” Reacher said. “I think that might be the best place to start.”
    “Then what?”
    “Then I’ll probably say it again.”
    “They can’t stay there.”
    “It’s a farm. Someone’s got to stay there.”
    “Are you volunteering?”
    “I might have to.”
    “Do you know anything about farming?”
    “Only what I’ve seen in the movies. Usually they get locusts. Or a fire.”
    “Not here. Floods, maybe.”
    “And idiots like me.”
    “Don’t beat yourself up. They faked a kidnap. Don’t blame yourself for taking it seriously.”
    “I should have seen it,” Reacher said. “It was weird from the start.”
    They passed the Bishop’s Arms. The pub. The end of the lunch hour. Five cars in the lot. The Grange Farm Land Rover was not one of them. They drove on, roughly east, and in the distance they saw the Bishops Pargeter church tower, gray, square, and squat. Only forty-some feet tall, but it dominated the flat landscape like the Empire State Building. They drove on. They passed the ditch that marked Grange Farm’s western boundary. Heard the bird scarer again, a loud booming shotgun blast.
    “I hate that thing,” Pauling said.
    Reacher said, “You might end up loving it. Camouflage like that could be our best friend.”
    “Could be Taylor’s best friend, too. In about sixty seconds from now. He’s going to think he’s under attack.”
    Reacher nodded.
    “Take a deep breath,” he said.
    He slowed the car well before the small flat bridge. Turned in wide and deliberate. Left it in second gear. Small vehicle, low speed. Unthreatening. He hoped.
    The driveway was long and it looped through two curves. Around unseen softness in the dirt, maybe. The beaten earth was muddy and less even than it had looked from a distance. The tiny car rocked and bounced. The farmhouse’s gable wall was blank. No windows. The smoke from the chimney was thicker now and straighter. Less wind. Reacher opened his window and heard nothing at all except the noise of his engine and the slow rolling crunch of his tires on gravel and small stones.
    “Where is everybody?” Pauling said. “Still out hoeing?”
    “You can’t hoe for seven hours straight,” Reacher said. “You’d break your back.”
    The driveway split thirty yards in front of the house. A fork in the road. West, the formal approach to the front door. East, a shabbier track toward the spot where the Land Rover had been parked, and the barns beyond. Reacher went east. The Land Rover wasn’t there anymore. All the barn doors were closed. The whole place was quiet. Nothing was moving.
    Reacher braked gently and backed up. Took the wider path west. There was a gravel circle with a stunted ash tree planted at its center. Around the tree was a circular wooden bench way too big for the thin trunk. Either the tree was a replacement or the carpenter had been thinking a hundred years ahead. Reacher drove around the circle clockwise, the British way. Stopped ten feet from the front door. It was closed. Nothing was moving