Without Fail

the church tower,” Reacher said.
    “Are you here on behalf of Armstrong?”
    Reacher said nothing.
    “No,” Mr. Froelich said. “You’re here to take an eye for an eye, aren’t you?”
    Reacher nodded. “And a tooth for a tooth.”
    “A life for a life.”
    “Two for five, to be accurate,” Reacher said. “They get the fat end of the deal.”
    “Are you comfortable with that?”
    “Are you?”
    The old guy’s watery eyes flicked all around the sunless room and came to rest on his daughter’s eighteen-year-old face.
    “Do you have a child?” he asked.
    “No,” Reacher said. “I don’t.”
    “Neither do I,” the old man said. “Not anymore. So I’m comfortable with it.”

    Reacher walked back to the Yukon and took the hiker’s map off the backseat. Then he climbed the church tower and found Neagley shuttling back and forth between the north and south side.
    “All clear,” she said, over the tick of the clock.
    “Stuyvesant called,” he said. “To the Froelichs’ house. He’s panicking. And Nendick woke up. Same approach as Andretti.”
    He unfolded the map and spread it out flat on the bell chamber floor. Put his finger on Grace. It was in the center of a rough square made by four roads. The square was maybe eighty miles high and eighty wide. The right-hand perimeter was made by Route 59, which ran up from Douglas in the south through a town called Bill to a town called Wright in the north. The top edge of the square was Route 387, which ran west from Wright to Edgerton. Both roads were shown on the map as secondaries. They had driven part of 387 already and knew it to be a pretty decent strip of blacktop. The left-hand edge of the square was I-25, which came down from Montana in the north and ran straight past Edgerton and all the way down to Casper. The bottom of the square was also I-25, where it came out of Casper and doglegged east to Douglas before turning south again and heading for Cheyenne. The whole eighty-mile square was split into two more or less equal vertical rectangles by the dirt road that ran north to south through Grace. That road showed up on the map as a thin dotted gray line. The key in the margin called it an unpaved minor track.
    “What do you think?” Neagley asked.
    Reacher traced the square with his finger. Widened his radius and traced a hundred miles east, and north, and west, and south. “I think that in the whole history of the western United States no person has ever just passed through Grace, Wyoming. It’s inconceivable. Why would anybody? Any coherent journey south to north or east to west would miss it altogether. Casper to Wright, say. Bottom left to top right. You’d use I-25 east to Douglas and Route 59 north out of Douglas to Wright. Coming through Grace makes no sense at all. It saves no miles. It just slows you down, because it’s a dirt track. And would you even notice the track? Remember what it looked like at the north end? I thought it was going nowhere.”
    “And we’ve got a hiker’s map,” Neagley said. “Maybe it’s not even on a regular road map.”
    “So that truck passed through for a reason,” Reacher said. “Not by accident, not for the fun of it.”
    “Those were the guys,” Neagley said.
    Reacher nodded. “They were on their reconnaissance run.”
    “I agree,” Neagley said. “But did they like what they saw?”
    Reacher closed his eyes. What did they see? They saw a tiny town with no safe hiding places. A helicopter landing site just fifty yards from the church. And a black SUV that looked a little like an official Secret Service vehicle already parked on the road, big and obvious. With Colorado plates, and Denver was probably the nearest Secret Service Field Office.
    “I don’t think they were turning cartwheels,” he said.
    “So will they abort? Or will they come back?”
    “Only one way to find out,” Reacher said. “We wait and see.”

    They waited. The sun fell away into afternoon and the temperature dropped like a stone. The clock ticked 3,600 times every hour. Neagley went out for a walk and came back with a bag from the grocery store. They ate an improvised lunch. Then they developed a new lookout pattern based on the fact that no vehicle could get all the way through either field of view in less than about eight minutes. So they sat comfortably and every five minutes by Neagley’s watch they knelt up and shuffled over to their louvers and scanned the length of the road. Each time there