The Hard Way

fruitless vigilance.
    Taylor said, “He’s waiting us out.”
    “Therefore he’s going to win,” Jackson said. “We can’t keep this up much longer.”
    “He’s had twenty-seven hours,” Pauling said. “We have to assume he’s armed by now.”
    “He’ll come tomorrow at dawn,” Taylor said.
    “You sure?” Reacher asked.
    “Not really.”
    “Me either. Three or four in the morning would work just as well.”
    “Too dark.”
    “If they’ve bought guns they could have bought night vision, too.”
    “How would you do it?”
    “Three guys loop around and walk in from the north. The other four come up the driveway, maybe two in a car, lights off, high speed, with the other two flanking it on foot. Two directions, seven guys, their choice of seven windows, we couldn’t stop at least three of them getting inside. They’d get you or a hostage before we could react.”
    “You’re a real ray of sunshine,” Taylor said.
    “I’m just trying to think like them.”
    “We’d get them before they got anywhere near the house.”
    “Only if all four of us can stay awake and alert for the next eight hours. Or the next thirty-two hours, if he delays another day. Or the next fifty-six hours, if he delays two days. Which he might. He’s in no hurry. And he’s not dumb. If he’s decided to wait us out, why not do it properly?”
    Taylor said, “We’re not moving. This place is a stronghold.”
    “Three-dimensionally it’s fine,” Reacher said. “But battles are fought in four dimensions, not three. Length, breadth, and height, plus time. And time is on Lane’s side, not ours. This is a siege now. We’re going to run out of food, and sooner or later all four of us are going to be asleep at the same time.”
    “So we’ll halve the guard. One man north, one man south, the other two resting but ready.”
    Reacher shook his head. “No, it’s time to get aggressive.”
    “How?”
    “I’m going to go find them. They’ve got to be holed up somewhere close. It’s time to pay them a visit. They won’t be expecting that.”
    “Alone?” Pauling said. “That’s insane.”
    “I have to anyway,” Reacher said. “I didn’t get Hobart’s money yet. There’s eight hundred grand out there. Can’t let it go to waste.”

----

    Taylor and Pauling stayed on guard and Reacher fetched the big Ordnance Survey map from the Mini’s glove box. He took Jade’s latest drawings off the kitchen table and piled them on a chair and spread out the map in their place. Then he went over it with Jackson. Jackson had a year’s worth of local knowledge, which was less than Reacher would have liked, but it was better than nothing. The map clarified most of the terrain issues all by itself with its faint orange contour lines, which were very widely spaced and which curved only gently. Flat land, probably the flattest in the British Isles. Like a pool table. Grange Farm and Bishops Pargeter were roughly in the center of a wide triangle of empty space bounded to the east by the road that ran south from Norwich to Ipswich in Suffolk and to the west by the Thetford road that Reacher and Pauling had driven three times already. Elsewhere in the triangle were meandering minor tracks and isolated farm settlements. Here and there chance and history had nestled small communities in the angles of crossroads. They were shown on the map as tiny gray squares and rectangles. Some of the rectangles represented short rows of houses. Some of the larger buildings were shown individually. The only one within any kind of a reasonable distance from Bishops Pargeter and labeled
PH
was the Bishop’s Arms.
    This is the only pub for miles, lad,
the farmer at the bar had said.
Why else do you think it’s so crowded?
    “Are they there, do you think?” Reacher asked.
    Jackson said, “If they stopped in Fenchurch Saint Mary first and then aimed for Bishops Pargeter afterward, then that’s the only place they could have passed. But they could have gone north. Nearer Norwich there are a lot of places.”
    “Can’t buy guns in Norwich,” Reacher said. “Not if you had to call Holland.”
    “Shotguns up there,” Jackson said. “Nothing heavier.”
    “So they probably didn’t go there,” Reacher said. He recalled the motoring atlas. The city of Norwich had been shown as a dense stain in the top-right corner of the bulge that was East Anglia. The end of the line. Not on the way to anyplace else.
    “I think they stayed close,” he