The Hard Way

73
    WITHOUT CONSCIOUS THOUGHT Reacher raised his rifle to the ready position. Stock nestled high against his right shoulder, safety off, right index finger inside the trigger guard, barrel just a degree or two below the horizontal. Long years of training, absorbed right down at the cellular level, permanently written in his DNA.
No point in having a weapon at all unless it’s ready for instant use,
his instructors had screamed.
    He stood absolutely still. Listened hard. Heard nothing at all. He moved his head left. Listened. Nothing. He moved his head right. Nothing.
    He tried the password one more time, soft and low:
Canaries.
    He heard no reply.
    Lane,
he thought.
    He wasn’t surprised. Surprise was strictly for amateurs, and Reacher was a professional. He wasn’t upset, either. He had learned a long time ago that the only way to keep fear and panic at bay was to concentrate ruthlessly on the job at hand. So he spent no time thinking about Lauren Pauling or Kate Lane. Or Jackson or Taylor. Or Jade. No time at all. He just walked backward and to his left. Preprogrammed. Like a machine. Silently. Away from the house. Making himself smaller as a target and improving his angle of view. He checked the windows. They were all dark. Just a faint red glow from the kitchen. The remains of the fire. The front door was closed. Near it was the faint shape of the Mini Cooper, cold and gray in the dark. It looked odd. Canted down at the front, like it was kneeling.
    He walked toward it through the dark, slow and stealthy. Knelt down on the driver’s side near the front fender and felt for the tire. It wasn’t there. There were torn shreds of rubber and a vicious curled length of bead wire. And shards of plastic from the shattered wheel well lining. That was all. He shuffled quietly around the tiny hood to the other side. Same situation. The wheel had its alloy rim on the ground.
    A front-wheel-drive car, comprehensively disabled. Both wheels. One had not been enough. A single tire can be changed. Two submachine gun bursts had been necessary. Twice the risk of detection. Although in Reacher’s experience an MP5 set to fire bursts of three sounded more innocent than a rifle firing single shots. A single gunshot was unmistakable. It was a singularity. It was a precise pinpoint of noise. An MP5 was rated to fire 900 rounds a minute. Fifteen every second. Which meant that a burst of three lasted a fifth of a second. Not quite a singularity. Altogether a different sound. Like a brief blurred purr instead. Like a distant motorcycle heard waiting at a light.
    Lane,
he thought again.
    But when?
    Seventy-five minutes previously he had been five miles away. Audibility decays according to the inverse square law. Twice the distance, the sound gets four times as quiet. Four times the distance, sixteen times as quiet. He had heard nothing. He was sure of that. Across land as flat and featureless and in night air as thick and damp as Norfolk’s he would have expected to hear MP5 bursts a couple of miles away. Therefore Lane had been gone at least thirty minutes. Maybe more.
    He stood still and listened hard. Heard nothing. Headed for the front door. It was closed but unlocked. He dropped his left hand off the rifle and turned the handle. Pushed the door open. Raised the rifle. The house was dark. It felt empty. He checked the kitchen. It was warm. Dull red embers in the hearth. Jade’s drawings were still on the kitchen chair where he had left them. Pauling’s purse was still where he had dumped it after taking the Maglite. There were empty mugs of tea all over the place. Dishes in the sink. The room looked exactly like he had left it, except there were no people in it.
    He switched on the flashlight and clamped it in his left palm under the rifle’s barrel. Used it to check all the other ground floor rooms. A formal dining room, empty, cold, dark, unused. Nobody in it. A formal parlor, furnished like the Bishop’s Arms saloon bar, still and quiet. Nobody in it. A powder room, a coat closet, the mud room. All empty.
    He crept up the stairs. The first room he came to was clearly Jade’s. He saw the green seersucker sundress folded on a chair. Drawings on the floor. The battered old toys that had been missing from the Dakota were all arrayed in a line along the bed, leaning on the wall. A one-eyed bear with the fur worn down to its backing, sitting up. A doll, one eye open and one eye closed, a lipstick effect inexpertly applied with a