The Hard Way

didn’t mean that, either. I meant with the whole thing.”
    “I told you we wouldn’t be putting anybody on trial.”
    Pauling nodded.
    “She’s cute,” she said. “Isn’t she?”
    “Who?”
    “Kate. She makes me feel ancient.”
    “Older women,” Reacher said. “Good for something.”
    “Thanks.”
    “I mean it. Give me a choice, I’d go home with you, not her.”
    “Why?”
    “Because I’m weird like that.”
    “I’m supposed to put people on trial.”
    “So was I, once. But I’m not going to this time. And I’m OK with that.”
    “Me too. That’s what’s bothering me.”
    “You’ll get over it. The backhoe and a plane ticket will help.”
    “Distance? Six feet of earth and three thousand air miles?”
    “Works every time.”
    “Does it? Really?”
    “We splattered a thousand bugs on our windshield yesterday. A thousand more today. One extra won’t make any difference.”
    “Lane isn’t a bug.”
    “No, he’s worse.”
    “What about the others?”
    “They’ve got a choice. The purest kind of choice there is. They can stay or they can go. Entirely up to them.”
    “Where do you think they are now?”
    “Somewhere out there,” Reacher said.

----

    A half-hour later Kate Lane came downstairs again. The tails of her borrowed shirt were tied at her waist and the sleeves were rolled to her elbows.
    “Jade’s asleep,” she said. She turned sideways to squeeze past a displaced dining chair and Reacher figured it was possible to see that she was pregnant. Just. Now that he had been told.
    He asked, “Is she doing OK?”
    “Better than we could have hoped,” Kate said. “She’s not sleeping great. The jet lag has screwed her up. And she’s a little nervous, I guess. And she doesn’t understand why there are no animals here. She doesn’t understand arable farming. She thinks we’re hiding a whole bunch of cute little creatures from her.”
    “Does she know about the new brother or sister or whatever it’s going to be?”
    Kate nodded. “We waited until we were on the plane. We tried to make it all part of the adventure.”
    “How was it at the airport?”
    “No problem. The passports were fine. They looked at the names more than the pictures. To make sure they matched the tickets.”
    Pauling said, “So much for Homeland Security.”
    Kate nodded again. “We got the idea from something we read in the newspaper. Some guy left on a short-notice business trip, grabbed his passport from the drawer, and he’d been through six separate countries before he realized it was his wife’s passport that he had grabbed.”
    Reacher said, “Tell me how the whole thing went down.”
    “It was pretty easy, really. We did stuff in advance. Bought the voice machine, rented the room, got the chair, took the car keys.”
    “Taylor did most of that, right?”
    “He said people would remember me more than him.”
    “He was probably right.”
    “But I had to buy the voice machine. Too weird if a guy who couldn’t talk wanted one.”
    “I guess.”
    “Then I copied the photograph at Staples. That was tough. I had to let Groom drive me. It would have been too suspicious to insist on Graham all the time. But after that it was easy. We left for Bloomingdale’s that morning and went straight to Graham’s apartment instead. Just holed up there and waited. We kept really quiet in case anyone checked with the neighbors. We kept the lights off and covered the windows in case anyone passed by on the street. Then later we started the phone calls. Right from the apartment. I was very nervous at first.”
    “You forgot to say no cops.”
    “I know. I thought I’d blown it immediately. But Edward didn’t seem to notice. Then it got much easier later. With practice.”
    “I was in the car with Burke. You sounded great by then.”
    “I thought there was someone with him. There was something in his voice. And he kept narrating where he was. He was telling you, I guess. You must have been hidden.”
    “You asked for his name in case you slipped and used it anyway.”
    Kate nodded. “I knew who it was, obviously. And I thought it might sound dominating.”
    “You know Greenwich Village pretty well.”
    “I lived there before I married Edward.”
    “Why did you split the demands into three parts?”
    “Because to ask for it all at once would have been too much of a clue. We thought we better let the stress build up a little. Then maybe Edward would miss the connection.”
    “I