Worth Dying For

a spell on the floor in his Marriott room, thinking. It was ten o’clock in the evening. His job was done, two hours ahead of his pretended midnight schedule. He got to his feet and packed up all eleven cartons and folded their flaps into place. He stacked them neatly in the centre of the floor, two piles of four and one of three. He dialled nine for a line, from the bedside table, and then he dialled the switchboard number he remembered from the transcript of Dorothy Coe’s original panic call, twenty-five years earlier. It was still an active number. It wasanswered. Reacher asked for Hoag, not really expecting to get him, but there was a click and a second of dead air and then the guy himself came on.
    ‘I’m done,’ Reacher told him.
    ‘Find anything?’
    ‘You guys did a fine job. Nothing for you to worry about. So I’m moving out.’
    ‘So soon? You’re not staying for the nightlife?’
    ‘I’m a simple soul. I like peace and quiet.’
    ‘OK, leave the stuff right there. We’ll swing by and pick it up. We’ll have it back in the basement before the file jockeys even get in tomorrow. They’ll never know a thing. Mission accomplished.’
    ‘I owe you,’ Reacher said.
    ‘Forget it,’ Hoag said. ‘Be all you can be, and all that shit.’
    ‘The chance would be a fine thing,’ Reacher said. He hung up and grabbed his coat and headed for the door. He was way in the back of the H-shaped layout, and he had to walk all the way forward to the lobby before getting outside and looping back around to where his car was parked. The stairs came down from the second floor just before the lobby, in a space that would have been another room in the wing, if it had been a one-storey structure. Just as Reacher got to them, a guy stepped off the last stair and fell in alongside him, heading the same way, to the lobby, to the door. He was one of the guys Reacher had seen checking in at the desk. Small and rumpled. Unshaven. Iranian, possibly. The guy glanced across. Reacher nodded politely. The guy nodded back. They walked on together. The guy had car keys swinging from his finger. A red tag. Avis. The guy glanced at Reacher again, up and across. Reacher glanced back. He held the door. The guy stepped out. Reacher followed. The guy looked at him again. Some kind of speculation in his eyes. Some kind of intense curiosity.
    Reacher stepped left, to loop around the length of the H on the outside. The Iranian guy stayed with him. Which made some kind of possible sense, after Reacher glanced ahead and saw two cars parked back there. Seth Duncan’s Cadillac, and a dark blueChevrolet. Prime rental material. Avis probably had thousands of them.
    A dark blue Chevrolet
.
    Reacher stopped.
    The other guy stopped.

THIRTY-TWO
    N OBODY KNOWS HOW LONG IT TAKES FOR THOUGHTS TO FORM . People talk about electrical impulses racing through nerves at a substantial fraction of the speed of light, but that’s mere transmission. That’s mail delivery. The letter is written in the brain, sparked to life by some sudden damp chemical reaction, two compounds arcing across synapses and reacting like lead and acid in an automobile battery, but instead of sending twelve dumb volts to a turn signal the brain floods the body with all kinds of subtle adjustments all at once, because thoughts don’t necessarily happen one at a time. They come in starbursts and waterfalls and explosions and they race away on parallel tracks, jostling, competing, fighting for supremacy.
    Reacher saw the dark blue Chevrolet and instantly linked it through Vincent’s testimony back at the motel to the two men he had seen from Dorothy Coe’s barn, while simultaneously critiquing the connection, in that Chevrolets were very common cars and dark blue was a very common colour, while simultaneously recalling the two matched Iranians and the two matched Arabs he had seen, and asking himself whether therendezvous of two separate pairs of strange men in winter in a Nebraska hotel could be just a coincidence, and if indeed it wasn’t, whether it might then reasonably imply the presence of a third pair of men, which might or might not be the two tough guys from Dorothy’s farm, however inexplicable those six men’s association might be, however mysterious their purpose, while simultaneously watching the man in front of him dropping his car key, and moving his arm, and putting his hand in his coat pocket, while simultaneously realizing that the guys he had seen on