Worth Dying For

of the building. He leaned on the old boards. They felt thin and veined, frozen by a hundred winters, baked by a hundred summers. They smelled of dust and age. He watched the darkness in the north, where he knew the road must be.
    He waited.

THIRTY-FIVE
    R EACHER WAITED TWENTY LONG MINUTES, AND THEN HE SAW light in the north. Very faint, maybe five or six miles away, really just a high hemispherical glow in the mist, trembling a little, bouncing, weakening and strengthening and weakening again. A moving bubble of light. Very white. Almost blue. A car, coming south towards him, pretty fast.
    Eleanor Duncan, presumably, right on time.
    Reacher waited.
    Two minutes later she was two miles closer, and the high hemispherical glow was bigger, and stronger, still bouncing, still trembling, but now it had a strange asynchronous pulse inside it, the bouncing now going two ways at once, the strengthening and the weakening now random and out of phase.
    There were two cars on the road, not one.
    Reacher smiled. The sentry. The football player, posted to the south. A college graduate. Not a dumb guy. He knew his five buddies had been sent home to bed because absolutely nothing was going to happen. He knew he had been posted as a precaution only, just for the sake of it. He knew he was facing a long night ofboredom, staring into the dark, no chance of glory. So what’s a guy going to do, when Eleanor Duncan suddenly blasts past him from behind, in her little red sports car? He’s going to see major brownie points on the table, that’s what. He’s going to give up on the blank hours ahead, and he’s going to pull out and follow her, and he’s going to dream of a promotion to the inner circle, and he’s going to imagine a scene and he’s going to rehearse a speech, because he’s going to pull Seth Duncan aside tomorrow, first thing in the morning, very discreetly, like an old friend or a trusted aide, and he’s going to whisper,
Yes, sir, I followed her all the way and I can show you exactly where she went
. Then he’s going to add,
No, sir, I told no one else, but I thought you should know
. Then he’s going to hop and shuffle in a modest and self-deprecating way and he’s going to say,
Well yes, sir, I thought it was much more important than sentry duty, and I’m glad you agree I did the right thing
.
    Reacher smiled again.
    Human nature.
    Reacher waited.
    Two more minutes, and the travelling bubble of light was another two miles closer, now much flatter and more elongated. Two cars, with some little distance between them. Predator and prey, some hundreds of yards apart. There was no red glow in the bubble. The football player’s headlights were falling short of the Mazda’s paint. The guy was maybe a quarter of a mile back, following the Mazda’s tail lights, no doubt thinking he was doing a hell of a job of staying inconspicuous. Maybe not such a smart guy. The Mazda had a mirror, and halogen headlights on a Nebraska winter night were probably visible from outer space.
    Reacher moved.
    He pushed off the corner of the building and looped around the Malibu’s hood and got in the driver’s seat. He locked the selector in first gear and put his left foot hard on the brake and his right foot on the gas. He goosed the pedal until the transmission was straining against the brake and the whole car was wound up tight and ready to launch. He kept one hand on the wheel and the other on the headlight switch.
    He waited.
    Sixty seconds.
    Ninety seconds.
    Then the Mazda flashed past, right to left, instantaneously, a tiny dark shape chasing a huge pool of bright light, its top down, a woman in a headscarf at the wheel, all chased in turn by tyre roar and engine noise and the red flare of tail lights. Then it was gone. Reacher counted
one
and flicked his headlights on and took his foot off the brake and stamped on the gas and shot forward and braked hard and stopped again sideways across the crown of the road. He wrenched open the door and spilled out and danced back towards the Malibu’s trunk, towards the shoulder he had just left. Two hundred yards to his right a big SUV was starting a panic stop. Its headlights flared yellow against the Malibu’s paint and then they nosedived into the blacktop as the truck’s front suspension crushed under the force of violent braking. Huge tyres howled and the truck lost its line and slewed to its right and went into a four-wheel slide and its nearside wheels tucked under and its