Worth Dying For

then, practicallyall sentries were less than perfect. It was any army’s most persistent problem.
    Half awake and half asleep. Half effective and half useless. He heard the car and he saw its lights, but it was a whole stubborn second before he understood he wasn’t dreaming.

FIFTY
    T HE CAR CAME IN FROM THE RIGHT, FROM THE EAST, PRECEDED BY headlight beams and road noise. It slowed to a walk and passed behind the parked Cornhusker pick-up, and then it rolled on and passed behind the parked SUV. Then it turned and nosed into the driveway, with a crunch and a squelch from its wheels on the gravel, and then it stopped.
    And then Reacher saw it.
    There was enough light scatter and enough reflection to identify it. It was the dark blue Chevrolet. The Italians. Reacher picked up the Remington. The car stayed where it was. No one got out. It was sixty yards away, half in and half out of the driveway mouth. Just sitting there, lights on, idling. A tactical problem. Reacher had three innocent non-combatants in a wood-frame house. There were two parked cars on the driveway and two on the road, for cover. There were two opponents and the house had windows and a door both front and back.
    Not ideal conditions for a gun battle.
    Best hope would be for the Italians to approach the front door on foot. Game over, right there. Reacher could swing thedoor open and fire point blank. But the Italians weren’t approaching on foot. They were just sitting in the car. Doing nothing. Talking, maybe. And scouting around. Reacher could see dim flashes of white as necks craned and heads turned. They were discussing something.
    Angelo Mancini was saying, ‘This is a waste of time. He ain’t in there. He can’t be. Not unless he’s hanging out with three of their football players.’
    Roberto Cassano nodded. He glanced over his shoulder at the pick-up truck and the SUV on the shoulder, and then he glanced ahead at the gold GMC Yukon on the driveway. It was parked in front of an older truck. He said, ‘That’s the old woman’s ride, from the farm.’
    Mancini said, ‘Sleepover time.’
    ‘I guess Mahmeini’s boy was right about something. They know the doctor is the weak link. They’ve got him staked out.’
    ‘Not much of a trap, all things considered. Not with their cars parked out front. No one is going to walk into that.’
    ‘Which is good for us, in a way. They’re wasting their resources. Which gives us a better chance somewhere else.’
    ‘Do you want to check here? Just in case?’
    ‘What’s the point? If he’s in there, he’s already their prisoner.’
    ‘That’s what I was thinking. But then I thought, not necessarily. They could be his prisoner.’
    ‘One against three?’
    ‘You saw what he did to the guy in the Cadillac’s trunk.’
    ‘I don’t know. I kind of want to check, I guess. And maybe we should. But you heard the man. This is a competition now. We can’t waste time.’
    ‘Wouldn’t take much time.’
    ‘I know. But we’ll look like idiots if he’s not in there. The football players will be straight on the phone to the Duncans, all yukking it up about how we came looking in a place he couldn’t possibly be.’
    ‘No one said there are style points involved.’
    ‘But there are. There are always style points involved. This isa long game. There’s a lot of money involved. If we lose face we’ll never get it back.’
    ‘So where?’
    Cassano looked again at the old woman’s truck. ‘If she’s here, then her house is empty tonight. And people looking for places to hide love empty houses.’
    Reacher saw them back out and drive away again. At first he didn’t understand why. Then he concluded they were looking for Seth Duncan. They had pulled up, they had eyeballed the parked cars, they had seen that the Mazda wasn’t among them, and they had gone away again. Logical. He put the Remington back on the floor, and planted his feet, and straightened his back, and stared out into the darkness.
    Nothing else happened for ninety long minutes. No one came, no one stirred. Then pale streaks of dawn started showing in the sky to Reacher’s right. They came in low and silver and purple, and the land slowly lightened from black to grey, and the world once again took solid shape, all the way to the far horizon. Rags of tattered cloud lit up bright overhead, and a knee-high mist rose up off the dirt. A new day. But not a good one, Reacher thought. It was going to be a day full of pain, both for