Worth Dying For

conspicuous out on the open road than the Cadillac, despite the garish colour. And probably less likely to be reported stolen. Out-of-state guys with guns and knives in their pockets generally kept a lot quieter than outraged local citizens.
    He checked left, checked right, checked behind, checked ahead. All quiet. Just cold air and silence and stillness and a night mist falling. He got back in the Malibu and kept the headlights off and turned around and nosed slowly out of the lot. He drove the length of McNally Street and paused. To the left was I-80, sixty miles south, a fast six-lane highway, a straight shot east all the way to Virginia. To the right were the forty farms, and the Duncans, and the Apollo Inn, and Eleanor, and the doctor and his wife, and Dorothy Coe, all of them sixty miles north.
    Decision time.
    Left or right? South or north?
    He flicked the headlights on and turned right and headed back north.

THIRTY-THREE
    T HE D UNCANS HAD MOVED FROM J ONAS D UNCAN ’ S KITCHEN TO Jasper’s, because Jasper still had a mostly full bottle of Knob Creek in his cupboard. All four men were around the table, elbow to elbow, amber half-inches of bourbon in thick chipped glasses set out in front of them. They were sipping slow and talking low. Their latest shipment was somewhere between twelve and twenty-four hours away. Usually a time for celebration. Like the night before Christmas. But this time they were a little subdued.
    Jonas asked, ‘Where do you suppose it is right now?’
    ‘Parked up for the night,’ Jacob said. ‘At least I hope so. Close to the border, but waiting for daylight. Prudence is the key now.’
    ‘Five hundred miles,’ Jonas said. ‘Crossing time plus ten hours, maybe. Plus contingencies.’
    Jasper asked, ‘How long do you suppose it takes to read a police file?’
    ‘Good question,’ Jacob said. ‘I’ve been giving it a little thought, naturally. It must be a very big file. And it must be stored away somewhere. Let’s say government workers start at nine in themorning. Let’s say they quit at five. Let’s say there’s some measure of bureaucracy involved in gaining access to the file. So let’s say noon tomorrow would be a practical starting point. That would give him five hours tomorrow, and maybe the full eight on the day after. That might be enough.’
    ‘So he won’t come back for forty-eight hours at least.’
    ‘I’m only guessing. I can’t be sure.’
    ‘Even so. We’ll have plenty of margin.’
    Seth Duncan said, ‘He won’t come back at all. Why would he? A hundred people read that file and said there was nothing wrong with it. And this guy isn’t a hundred times smarter than anyone else. He can’t be.’
    Nobody spoke.
    Seth said, ‘What?’
    His father said, ‘He doesn’t have to be smarter than anyone else, son. Certainly not a hundred times smarter. He just has to be smart in a different way. Lateral, is what they call it.’
    ‘But there’s no evidence. We all know that.’
    ‘I agree,’ Jacob said. ‘But that’s the damn point. It’s not about what’s in the file. It’s about what isn’t in the file.’
    The Malibu was like half a Cadillac. Four cylinders instead of eight, one ton instead of two, and about half as long. But it worked OK. It was cruising nicely. Not that Reacher was paying much attention to it. He was thinking about the dead Iranian, and the odds against hitting a T-wave window. The guy had been small, built like a bird, and Reacher tended to assume that people opposite him on the physical spectrum were also opposite him on the personality spectrum, so that in place of his own placid nature he imagined the guy was all strung out and nervous, which might have meant that back there in the parking lot the guy’s heart was going as fast as 180 beats a minute, which meant those T-waves were coming around fast and furious, three times a second, which meant that the odds of hitting one of those crucial fifteen-millisecond windows ahead of a peak were about forty-five in a thousand, or a little better than one in twenty.
    Unlucky. For the Iranian, certainly. But no cause for majorregret. Most likely Reacher would have had to put him down anyway, one way or another, sooner or later, probably within just a few more heartbeats. It would have been practically inevitable. Once a gun was pulled, there were very few other available options. But still, it had been a first. And a last, probably, at least for a spell. Because Reacher