The Hard Way

hung out in the pub with a bunch of nosy farmers. I’m sure you would have rather stayed home, under the circumstances. With your new family. But you couldn’t do that. Because you wanted to lay a clear trail. Because you knew Lane would hire someone like me. And you wanted to help someone like me find you. Because you wanted to bring Lane here for a showdown.”
    Silence in the room.
    Reacher said, “You wanted to be on your home turf. And you figured this is an easy place to defend.”
    More silence. Reacher glanced at Kate.
    “You were upset,” he said. “Not that Lane was coming, but that he was coming
now.
Already. Too soon.”
    Kate said nothing. But Taylor nodded. “Like I said before, he was a little faster than we expected. But yes, we wanted him to come.”
    “Why?”
    “You just said it. We wanted a showdown. Closure. Finality.”
    “Why now?”
    “I told you.”
    “Reparations for the wounded aren’t urgent. Not like this.”
    Kate Lane looked up from her chair by the fire.
    “I’m pregnant,” she said.

CHAPTER 68
    IN THE SOFT light of the flames from the hearth, Kate’s simple and vulnerable beauty was emphasized to the point of heartbreak. She said, “When Edward and I first started fighting he accused me of being unfaithful. Which wasn’t actually true back then. But he was in a rage. He said if he ever caught me sleeping around he would show me how much it hurt him by doing something to Jade that would hurt me even more. He went into the kind of detail I can’t repeat now. Not in front of her. But it was very frightening. It was so frightening that I persuaded myself not to take it seriously. But after hearing about Anne and Knight and Hobart I knew I had to take it seriously. By which time I really did have something to hide. So we ran. And here we are.”
    “With Lane right behind you.”
    “He deserves whatever he gets, Mr. Reacher. He’s truly a monster.”
    Reacher turned to Jackson. “You’re not fixing the backhoe to dredge ditches, are you? It’s not raining and the ditches look fine anyway. And you wouldn’t take time out to do something like that. Not right now. Not under these circumstances. You’re fixing the backhoe to dig graves, aren’t you?”
    “At least one grave,” Taylor said. “Maybe two or three, until the whole crew goes home and leaves us alone. You got a problem with that?”
    We’ll find Taylor,
Reacher had said, on the plane.
Lane will take care of him, and then I’ll take care of Lane.
Pauling had asked him,
What about the others?
Reacher had said:
If I think the crew will fall apart with Lane
gone, then I’ll leave the others alone and let it. But if one of them wants to step up and take over, I’ll do him, too. And so on and so forth, until the crew really does fall apart.
    Pauling had said:
Brutal.
    Reacher had asked:
Compared to what?
    He looked straight at Taylor.
    “No,” he answered. “I guess I don’t have a problem with that. Not really. No problem at all, in fact. I’m just not used to finding people on the same wavelength as me.”
    “You keeping your million bucks?”
    Reacher shook his head. “I was going to give it to Hobart.”
    “That’s good,” Kate said. “That frees up some of our money for the others.”
    Taylor said, “Ms. Pauling? What about you? Do you have a problem?”
    Pauling said, “I ought to. I ought to have a huge problem. Once upon a time I swore an oath to uphold the law.”
    “But?”
    “I can’t get to Lane any other way. So no, I don’t have a problem.”
    “So we’re in business,” Taylor said. “Welcome to the party.”

----

    After they finished their tea Jackson took Reacher into a small mud room off the back of the kitchen and opened a double-door wall cupboard above a washing machine. In it were racked four Heckler & Koch G-36 automatic rifles. The G-36 was a very modern design that had showed up in service just before Reacher’s military career had ended. Therefore he wasn’t very familiar with it. It had a nineteen-inch barrel and an open folding stock and was basically fairly conventional apart from a huge superstructure that carried a bulky optical sight integrated into an oversized carrying handle. It was chambered for the standard 5.56mm NATO round and like most German weapons it looked very expensive and beautifully engineered.
    Reacher asked, “Where did you get these from?”
    “I bought them,” Jackson said. “From a bent quartermaster in Holland. Susan went