Worth Dying For

are, and don’t move a muscle,’ and then he closed the door on them.
    His partner said, ‘So what now?’
    The guy with the flashlight said, ‘We need to know if Reacher is awake or asleep.’
    ‘We hit him pretty hard.’
    ‘Best guess?’
    ‘What’s yours?’
    The guy with the flashlight didn’t answer. He stepped back down the hallway to the basement door. He pounded on it with the flat of his hand. He called, ‘Reacher, turn the power back on, or something bad is going to happen up here.’
    No response.
    Silence.
    The guy with the flashlight hit the door again and said, ‘I’m not kidding, Reacher. Turn the damn power back on.’
    No response.
    Silence.
    The other guy asked again, ‘So what now?’
    The guy with the flashlight said, ‘Go get the doctor’s wife.’ He aimed the beam at the dining room door and his partner went in and came back out holding the doctor’s wife by the elbow. The guy with the flashlight said, ‘Scream.’
    She said, ‘What?’
    ‘Scream, or I’ll make you.’
    She paused a beat and blinked in the light of the beam, and then she screamed, long and high and loud. Then she stopped and dead silence came back and the guy with the flashlight hammered on the basement door again and called, ‘You hear that, asshole?’
    No response.
    Silence.
    The guy with the flashlight jerked the beam back towards the dining room and his partner led the doctor’s wife back down the hallway and pushed her inside and closed the door on her again. He said, ‘So?’
    The guy with the flashlight said, ‘We wait for daylight.’
    ‘That’s four hours away.’
    ‘You got a better idea?’
    ‘We could call the mothership.’
    ‘They’ll just tell us to handle it.’
    ‘I’m not going down there. Not with him.’
    ‘Me either.’
    ‘So what do we do?’
    ‘We wait him out. He thinks he’s smart, but he isn’t. We can sit in the dark. Anyone can. It ain’t exactly rocket science.’
    They followed the dancing beam back to the living room and sat side by side on the sofa with the old Remington propped between them. They clicked off the flashlight, to save the battery, and the room went pitch dark again, and cold, and silent.
    Mahmeini’s man walked parallel with the driveway for a hundred yards and then came up against a length of fence that ran south directly across his path. It defined the lower left-hand part of the crossbar of the hollow T that was the Duncans’ compound. It was made of five-inch rails, all of them a little gnarled and warped, but easy enough to climb. He got over it without any difficulty and paused for a second with the three pick-up trucks and the Mazda parked to his left, and the southernmost house straight in front of him. The centre house was the only one that was dark. The southernmost and the northernmost houses both had light in them, faint and a little secondhand, as if only back rooms were in use and stray illumination was finding its way out to the front windows through internal passageways and open doors. There was the smell of wood smoke in the air. But no sound, not even talking. Mahmeini’s man hesitated, choosing, deciding, making up his mind. Left or right?
    Cassano and Mancini came on the compound from the rear, out of the dark and dormant field, and they stopped on the far side of the fence opposite the centre house, which was Jonas’s, as far as they knew. It was closed up and dark, but both its neighbours had light in their kitchen windows, spilling out in bright bars across the weedy backyard gravel. The gravel was matted down into the dirt, but it was still marginally noisy, Cassano knew. He had walked across it earlier in the day, to find undisturbed locations for his phone conversations with Rossi. Their best play would be to stay on the wrong side of the fence, in the last of the field, and then head directly for their chosen point of entry. That would reduce the sound of their approach to a minimum.But which would be their chosen point of entry? Left or right? Jasper’s place, or Jacob’s?
    All four Duncans were in Jasper’s basement, hunting through old cartons for more veterinary anaesthetic. The last of the hog dope had been used on Seth’s nose, and his busted hand was going to need something stronger anyway. Two fingers were already swollen so hard the skin was fit to burst. Jasper figured he had something designed for horses, and he planned to find it and flood Seth’s wrist joint with it. He was no anatomist, but he