Without Fail

“Oregon isn’t. They wouldn’t have revealed their specific identity to Armstrong if they still lived in Oregon. Nevada is a possibility. Or Utah or Idaho. Anywhere else is too far.”
    “For what?”
    “To be on a reasonable radius from Sacramento. How long does a stolen cooler of ice last?”
    Neagley said nothing.
    “Nevada or Utah or Idaho,” Reacher said. “That’s my guess. Not California. I think they wanted a state line between them and the place they went for the thumb. Feels better, psychologically. I think they’re a long day’s drive from Sacramento. Which means they’re probably a long day’s drive from here, too, in the other direction. So I think they’ll be coming in by road, armed to the teeth.”
    “When?”
    “Today, if they’ve got any sense.”
    “The bat was mailed in Utah,” Neagley said.
    Reacher nodded. “OK, so scratch Utah. I don’t think they wanted to mail anything in their home state.”
    “So Idaho or Nevada,” Neagley said. “We better watch for license plates.”
    “This is a tourist destination. There are going to be plenty of out-of-state plates. Like we’ve got Colorado plates.”
    “How will they aim to do it?”
    “Edward Fox,” Reacher said. “They want to survive, and they’re reasonable with a rifle. Hundred and twenty yards in Minnesota, ninety in D.C. They’ll aim to get him in the church doorway, somewhere like that. Maybe out in the graveyard. Drop him right next to somebody else’s headstone.”
    Neagley slowed and turned right onto Route 220. It was a better road, wider, newer blacktop. It ran with a river wandering next to it. The sky was lighter in the east. Up ahead was a faint glow from the city of Casper, twenty miles north. The snow was still blowing in from the west, slow and lazy.
    “So what’s our plan?” Neagley asked.
    “We need to see the terrain,” Reacher said.
    He looked sideways out the window. He had seen nothing but darkness since leaving Denver.

    They stopped on the outer edge of Casper for gas and more coffee and a bathroom. Then Reacher took a turn at the wheel. He picked up Route 87 north out of town and drove fast for thirty miles because Route 87 was also I-25 again and was wide and straight. And he drove fast because they were late. Dawn was in full swing to the east and they were still well short of Grace. The sky was pink and beautiful and the light came in brilliant horizontal shafts and lit the mountainsides in the west. They were meandering through the foothills. On their right, to the east, the world was basically flat all the way to Chicago and beyond. On their left, distant in the west, the Rocky Mountains reared two miles high. The lower slopes were dotted with stands of pine and the peaks were white with snow and streaked with gray crags. For miles either side of the ribbon of road was high desert, with sagebrush and tan grasses blazing purple in the early sun.
    “Been here before?” Neagley asked.
    “No,” he said.
    “We need to turn,” she said. “Soon, east toward Thunder Basin.”
    He repeated the name in his head, because he liked the sound of the words. Thunder Basin. Thunder Basin .

    He made a shallow right off the highway onto a narrow county road. There were signposts to Midwest and Edgerton. The land fell away to the east. Pines a hundred feet tall threw morning shadows a hundred yards long. There was endless ragged grassland interrupted here and there by the remains of old industrial enterprises. There were square stone foundations a foot high and tangles of old iron.
    “Oil,” Neagley said. “And coal mining. All closed down eighty years ago.”
    “The land looks awful flat,” Reacher said.
    But he knew the flatness was deceptive. The low sun showed him creases and crevices and small escarpments that were nothing compared to the mountains on his left but were a long way from being flat . They were in a transition area, where the mountains shaded randomly into the high plains. The geological tumult of a million years ago rippled outward all the way to Nebraska, frozen in time, leaving enough cover to hide a walking man in a million different places.
    “We need it to be totally flat,” Neagley said.
    Reacher nodded at the wheel. “Except for maybe one little hill a hundred yards from where Armstrong is going to be. And another little hill a hundred yards back from it, where we can watch from.”
    “It isn’t going to be that easy.”
    “It never is,” Reacher