Worth Dying For

team, aren’t we?’
    ‘You should have kept him around. We need to make a plan first.’
    ‘For this? We don’t need to make a plan. It’s just flushing a guy out. How hard can it be? You said it yourself, the locals will help.’
    ‘They’re all asleep.’
    ‘We’ll wake them up. With a bit of luck we’ll get it done before morning.’
    ‘And then what?’
    ‘Then we’ll spend the day leaning on the Duncans. We all need that delivery, and since we all had to drag ourselves up here, we might as well all spend our time on what’s important.’
    ‘So where do we start?’
    ‘You tell me. You’ve spent time here.’
    ‘The doctor,’ Cassano said. ‘He’s the weakest link.’
    Mahmeini’s man said, ‘So where’s the doctor?’
    ‘South and west of here.’
    ‘OK, go talk to him. I’ll go somewhere else.’
    ‘Why?’
    ‘Because if you know he’s the weakest link, then so does Reacher. Dollars to doughnuts, he ain’t there. So you go waste your time, and I’ll go do some work.’
    Vincent gave up on cracking the window. He could tell there was no way it would open without a ripping sound, and drawing attention right then would not be a good idea. And the impromptu conference in his lot was breaking up anyway. The small rumpled man slid back into Seth Duncan’s Cadillac and the big black car crunched through a wide arc over the gravel. Its headlight beams swept across Vincent’s window. He duckedjust in time. Then the Cadillac turned left on the two-lane and took off south.
    The other four men stayed right where they were. They watched until the Cadillac’s tail lights were lost to sight, and then they turned back and started talking again, face to face in pairs, each one of them with his right hand in his right-hand coat pocket, for some strange reason, all four of them symmetrical, like a formal tableau.
    Roberto Cassano watched the Cadillac go and said, ‘He doesn’t have a partner. There’s nobody working behind the lines. What lines, anyway? It’s all bullshit.’
    Safir’s main man said, ‘Of course he has a partner. We all saw him, right there in your room.’
    ‘He’s gone. He ran out. He took whatever car they rented. That guy is on his own now. He stole that Cadillac from the lot. We saw it there earlier.’
    No reply.
    Cassano said, ‘Unless one of you had a hand in it. Or both of you.’
    ‘What are you saying?’
    ‘We’re all grown-ups here,’ Cassano said. ‘We know how the world works. So let’s not pretend we don’t. Mahmeini told his guys to take the rest of us out, and Safir told you guys to take the rest of us out, and Rossi sure as hell told us to take the rest of you out. I’m being honest here. Mahmeini and Safir and Rossi are all the same. They all want the whole pie. We all know that.’
    Safir’s guy said, ‘We didn’t do anything. We figured you did. We were talking about it all the way up here. It was obvious that Cadillac isn’t a rental.’
    ‘We didn’t do anything to the guy. We were going to wait for later.’
    ‘Us too.’
    ‘You sure?’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘Swear?’
    ‘You swear first.’
    Cassano said, ‘On my mother’s grave.’
    Safir’s guy said, ‘On mine too. So what happened?’
    ‘He ran out. Must have. Maybe chicken. Or short on discipline. Maybe Mahmeini isn’t what we think he is. Which raises possibilities.’
    Nobody spoke.
    Cassano said, ‘We have a vote here, don’t you think? The four of us? We could take out Mahmeini’s other boy, and leave each other alone. That way Rossi and Safir end up with fifty per cent more pie each. They could live with that. And we sure as hell could.’
    ‘Like a truce?’
    ‘Truces are temporary. Call it an alliance. That’s permanent.’ Nobody spoke. Safir’s guys glanced at each other. Not a difficult decision. A two-front war, or a one-front war? History was positively littered with examples of smart people choosing the latter over the former.
    Vincent was still watching out the window. He saw quiet conversation, low tones, some major tension there, then some easing, the body language relaxing, some speculative looks, some tentative smiles. Then all four men took their hands out of their pockets and shook, four separate ways, wrists crossing, some pats on the back, some slaps on the shoulder. Four new friends, all suddenly getting along just great.
    There was a little more talk after that, all of it fast and breezy, like simple obvious steps were being planned and