FORTY-ONE

SETH DUNCAN HAD A HUGE ALUMINIUM SPLINT ON HIS FACE, LIKE a dull metal patch taped to a large piece of rotten fruit. All kinds of sick moonlit colours were spreading out from under it. Yellows, and browns, and purples. He was wearing dark pants and a dark sweater with a new parka over it. The shotgun in his hands was an old Remington 870 pump. Probably a twelve-gauge, probably a twenty-inch barrel. A walnut stock, a seven-round tubular magazine, altogether a fine all-purpose weapon, well proven, more than four million built and sold, used by the Navy for shipboard security, used by the Marines for close-quarters combat, used by the army for heavy short-range firepower, used by civilians for hunting, used by cops as a riot gun, used by cranky homeowners as a get-off-my-lawn deterrent.

Nobody moved.

Reacher watched carefully and saw that Seth Duncan was holding the Remington pretty steady. His finger was on the trigger. He was aiming it from the hip, straight back at Reacher, which meant he was aiming it at Dorothy Coe and the doctor and his wife, too, because buckshot spreads a little, and all four of them were clustered tight together, on the driveway ten feet from the doctor's front door. All kinds of collateral damage, just waiting to happen.

Nobody spoke.

The Mazda idled. Its door was still open. Seth Duncan started to move up the driveway. He raised the Remington's stock to his shoulder and closed one eye and squinted along the barrel and walked forward, slow and steady. A useless manoeuvre on rough terrain. But feasible on smooth gravel. The Remington stayed dead on target.

He stopped thirty feet away. He said, 'All of you sit down. Right where you are. Cross-legged on the ground.'

Nobody moved.

Reacher asked, 'Is that thing loaded?'

Duncan said, 'You bet your ass it is.'

'Take care it doesn't go off by accident.'

'It won't,' Duncan said, all nasal and inarticulate, because of his injury, and because his cheek was pressed hard against the Remington's walnut stock.

Nobody moved. Reacher watched and thought. Behind him he heard the doctor stir and heard him ask, 'Can we talk?'

Duncan said, 'Sit down.'

The doctor said, 'We should discuss this. Like reasonable people.'

'Sit down.'

'No, tell us what you want.'

A brave try, but in Reacher's estimation the wrong tactic. The doctor thought there was something to be gained by spinning things out, by using up the clock. Reacher thought the exact opposite was true. He thought there was no time to waste. None at all. He said, 'It's cold.'

Duncan said, 'So?'

'Too cold to sit down outside. Too cold to stand up outside. Let's go inside.'

'I want you outside.'

'Why?'

'Because I do.'

'Then let them go get their coats.'

'Why should I?'

'Self-respect,' Reacher said. 'You're wearing a coat. If it's warm enough not to need one, then you're a pussy. If it's cold enough to bundle up, then you're making innocent people suffer unnecessarily. If you think you've got a beef with me, OK, but these folks have never hurt you.'

Seth Duncan thought about it for a second, the gun still up at his shoulder, his head still bent down to it, one eye still closed. He said, 'OK, one at a time. The others stay here, like hostages. Mrs Coe goes first. Get your coat. Nothing else. Don't touch the phone.'

Nobody moved for a beat, and then Dorothy Coe peeled out of the cluster and walked to the door and stepped inside. She was gone a minute, and then she came back wearing her coat, this time buttoned over her dress. She resumed her position.

Duncan said, 'Sit down, Mrs Coe.'

Dorothy tugged her coat down and sat, not cross-legged, but with her knees drawn up to one side.

Reacher said, 'Now the doctor's wife.'

Duncan said, 'Don't tell me what to do.'

'I'm just saying. Ladies first, right?'

'OK, the doctor's wife. Go. Same rules. Just the coat. Don't touch the phone. Don't forget I have hostages here. Including your beloved husband.'

The doctor's wife peeled out of the cluster. A minute later she was back, wearing her wool coat, and a hat, and gloves, and a muffler.

'Sit down,' Duncan said.

She sat down, right next to Dorothy Coe, cross-legged, her back straight, her hands on her knees, her gaze level and aimed at a faraway spot in the fields. Nothing there, but Reacher guessed it was better than looking at her tormentor.

Reacher said, 'Now the doctor.'

'OK, go,' Duncan said.

The doctor peeled out and was gone a minute. He came back in a blue parka, all kinds of nylon and Gore-tex and zippered compartments. He sat down without waiting to be told.

Reacher said, 'Now me.'

Duncan said, 'No, not you. Not now, not ever. You stay right there. I don't trust you.'

'That's not very nice.'

'Sit down.'

'Make me.'

Duncan leaned into the gun, the final per cent, like he was ready to fire.

He said, 'Sit down.'

Reacher didn't move. Then he glanced to his right and saw lights in the mist, and he knew that his chance had gone.

The Cornhuskers came on fast, five of them in five separate vehicles, a tight little high-speed convoy, three pick-up trucks and two SUVs. They all jammed to a stop on the road in line with the fence, five vehicles all nose to tail, and five doors flung open, and five guys spilled out, all of them in red jackets, all of them moving fast, the smallest of them the size of a house. They swarmed straight in, climbing the fence in unison, moving across the dormant lawn on a broad front, coming in wide of the Remington's potential trajectory. The Remington stayed rock steady in Seth Duncan's hands. Reacher was watching its muzzle. It wasn't moving at all, its blued steel dark in the moonlight, trained dead on his chest from thirty feet, the smooth bore at its centre looking big enough to stick a thumb in.

Duncan said, 'Take the three others inside, and keep them there.'

Rough hands grabbed at the doctor, and his wife, and Dorothy Coe, hauling them back to their feet, by their arms and shoulders, pulling them away, hustling them across the last of the gravel, pushing them in through the door. Eight people went in, and a minute later four came out, all of them football players, all of them crunching back to where Reacher was standing.

Duncan said, 'Hold him.'

Reacher was spending no time on regret or recrimination. No time at all. The time for rueing mistakes and learning from them came later. As always he was focused in the present and the immediate future. People who wasted time and energy cursing recent errors were certain losers. Not that Reacher saw an easy path to certain victory. Not right then. Not in the short term. Right then he saw nothing ahead but a world of hurt.

The four big guys stepped up close. No opportunity. The Remington stayed trained on its target and two guys came in from wide positions, never getting between Reacher and the gun. They stepped alongside him and grabbed an arm each, big strong hands on his elbows from behind, on his wrists from in front, pushing one, pulling the other, straightening his arms, bending his elbows back, kicking his feet apart, hooking their ankles in front of his ankles, holding him immobile. A third guy came up behind him and stood between his spread feet and wrapped massive arms around his chest. The fourth backed off and stood ten feet from Duncan.

Reacher didn't struggle. No point. Absolutely no point at all. Each of the three men holding him was taller than him by inches and outweighed him by fifty pounds. No doubt they were all slow and stupid and untutored, but right then sheer dumb bulk was doing the job just fine. He could move his feet a little, and he could move his head a little, but that was all, and all he could do with his feet was move them backward, which would pitch him forward on his face, except that the guy who had him in the bear hug from behind would hold him upright. And all he could do with his head was duck his chin to his chest, or jerk it back a couple of inches. Not enough to hurt the guy behind him.

He was stuck, and he knew it.

Seth Duncan lowered the gun to his hip again. He walked forward with it and then handed it off to the fourth guy. He walked on without it and stopped face to face with Reacher, a yard away. His eyes were bloodshot and his breathing was low and shallow. He was quivering a little. Some kind of fury or excitement. He said, 'I have a message for you, pal.'

Reacher said, 'Who from? The National Association of Assholes?'

'No, from me personally.'

'What, you let your membership lapse?'

'Ten seconds from now we'll know who's a member of that club, and who isn't.'

'So what's the message?'

'It's more of a question.'

'OK, so what's the question?'

'The question is, how do you like it?'

Reacher had been fighting since he was five years old, and he had never had his nose broken. Not even once. Partly good luck, and partly good management. Plenty of people had tried, over the years, either deliberately or in a flurry of savage unaimed blows, but none had ever succeeded. Not one. Not ever. Not even close. It was a fact Reacher was proud of, in a peculiar way. It was a symbol. A talisman. A badge of honour. He had all kinds of nicks and cuts and scars on his face and his arms and his body, but he felt that the distinctive but intact bone in his nose made up for them.

It said: I'm still standing.

The blow came in exactly as he expected it to, a clenched fist, a straight right, hard and heavy, riding up a little, aiming high, as if Duncan subconsciously expected Reacher to flinch up and back, like his wife Eleanor probably did every single time. But Reacher didn't flinch up and back. He started with his head up and back, his eyes open, watching down his nose, timing it, then jerking forward from the neck, smashing a perfect improvised head-butt straight into Duncan's knuckles, an instant high-speed high-impact collision between the thick ridge in Reacher's brow and the delicate bones in Duncan's hand. No contest. No contest at all. Reacher had a skull like concrete, and an arch was the strongest structure known to man, and hands were the most fragile parts of the body. Duncan screamed and snatched his hand away and cradled it limp against his chest and hopped a whole yowling circle, looking up, looking down, stunned and whimpering. He had three or four busted phalanges, Reacher figured, certainly a couple of proximals, and maybe a couple of cracked distals too, from the fingers folding much tighter than nature intended, under the force of the sudden massive compression.

'Asshole,' Reacher said.

Duncan clamped his right wrist under his left armpit and huffed and blew and stomped around. He came to rest a whole minute later, a little cramped and crouched and bent, and he glowered up and out from either side of his splint, hurting and angry and humiliated, looking first at Reacher, and then at his fourth guy, who was standing there stock-still, holding the shotgun. Duncan jerked his head, from the guy to Reacher, a gesture full of silent fury and impatience.

Get him.

The fourth guy stepped up. Reacher was pretty sure he wasn't going to shoot. No one fires a shotgun at a group of four people, three of which are his friends.

Reacher was pretty sure it was going to be worse than shooting.

The guy reversed the gun. Right hand on the barrel, left hand on the stock.

The guy behind Reacher moved. He wrapped his left forearm tight around Reacher's throat, and he clamped his right palm tight on Reacher's forehead.

Immobile.

The fourth guy raised the gun horizontal, butt first, two-handed, and cocked it back over his right shoulder, ready to go, lining it up like a spear, and then he rocked forward and took a step and aimed carefully and jabbed the butt straight at the centre of Reacher's face and

CRACK

BLACK

FORTY-TWO

JACOB DUNCAN CONVENED AN UNSCHEDULED MIDDLE-OF-THE-NIGHT meeting with his brothers, in his own kitchen, not Jonas's or Jasper's, with Wild Turkey, not Knob Creek, and plenty of it, because his mood was celebratory.

'I just got off the phone,' he said. 'You'll be pleased to hear my boy has redeemed himself.'

Jasper asked, 'How?'

'He captured Jack Reacher.'

Jonas asked, 'How?'

Jacob Duncan leaned back in his chair and shot his feet straight out in front of him, relaxed, expansive, a man at ease, a man with a story to tell. He said, 'I drove Seth home, as you know, but I let him out at the end of his road, because he was a little down, and he wanted to walk a spell in the night air. He got within a hundred yards of his house, and he was nearly run over by a car. His car, as it happens. His own Cadillac, going like a bat out of hell. Naturally he hurried home. His wife was induced to reveal all the details. It turns out Reacher stole the Cadillac earlier in the afternoon. It turns out the doctor was with him. Misguided, of course, but it seems the poor fellow has formed an alliance of sorts with our Mr Reacher. So Seth took his old Remington pump and set off in Eleanor's car and sure enough, Reacher was indeed at the doctor's house, large as life and twice as natural.'

'Where is he now?'

'In a safe place. It seems like the capture was mostly uneventful.'

'Is he alive?'

'So far,' Jacob Duncan said. 'But how long he stays alive is what we need to discuss.'

The room went quiet. The others sat and waited, as they had so many times before, for their brother Jacob, the eldest, a contemplative man, always ready with a pronouncement, or a decision, or a nugget of wisdom, or an analysis, or a proposal.

Jacob said, 'Seth wants to finesse the whole thing, right down to the wire, and frankly I'm tempted to let him try. He wants to rebuild his credibility with us, which of course I told him isn't necessary, but it remains true that all of us need to pay some attention to our own credibility, in a collective sense, with Mr Rossi, our good friend to the south.'

Jasper asked, 'What does Seth want to do?'

'He wants to stage things so that our prior hedging is shown to have been entirely justified. He wants to wait until our shipment is about an hour away, whereupon he wants to unveil Reacher to Mr Rossi's boys, whereupon he wants to fake a phone call and have the truck arrive within the next sixty minutes, as if what we've been saying all along about the delay was indeed true and legitimate.'

'Too risky,' Jonas said. 'Reacher is a dangerous man. We shouldn't keep him around a minute longer than we have to. That's just asking for trouble.'

'As I said, he's in a safe place. Plus, in the end, if we do it Seth's way, we'll have been seen to have solved our own problems with our own hands, without any outside assistance at all, and therefore whatever small shred of vulnerability we displayed will evaporate completely.'

'Even so. It's still risky.'

'There are other factors,' Jacob said.

The room went quiet again.

Jacob said, 'We've never really known or cared what happens to our shipments once they're in Mr Rossi's hands, except that I imagine we always vaguely supposed they pass down a lengthy chain of commerce, sale and resale, to an ultimate destination. And now that chain, or at least a large part of it, has become visible. As of tonight, it seems that three separate participants have representation here. Probably they're all desperate. It's clear to me they have agreed to work together to break up the logjam. And once that is done, it's equally clear to me they will be under instructions to eliminate one another, so that the last man standing triples his profit.'

Jonas said, 'That's not relevant to us.'

'Except that Mr Rossi's boys seem to be jumping the gun. It was inevitable that one of them would seize the initiative. Our stooges on the phone tree tell me that two men are already dead. Mr Rossi's boys killed them outside Mr Vincent's motel. So my idea is to give Mr Rossi's boys enough time to shorten the chain a little more, so that by the end of tomorrow Mr Rossi himself will be the last man standing, whereupon he and we can have a little talk about splitting the extra profit equally. The way it works mathematically is that we'll all double our shares. Mr Rossi will be happy to live with that, I imagine, and so will we, I'm sure.'

'Still risky.'

'You don't like money, brother?'

'I don't like risk.'

'Everything's a risk. We know that, don't we? We've lived with risk for a long time. It's part of the thrill.'

A long silence.

Jonas said, 'The doctor lied to us. He told us Reacher hitched a ride in a white sedan.'

Jacob nodded. 'He has apologized for that, most sincerely. I'm told he's being a model of cooperation now. His wife is with him, of course. I'm sure that's a factor. He also claims Reacher left Seth's Cadillac sixty miles south of here, and that it was re-stolen quite independently by an operative from further up the chain. A small Middle Eastern person, according to reports on the phone tree. It appears he was the one who nearly ran Seth over.'

'Anything else?'

'The doctor says Reacher saw the police files.'

Silence in the room.

Then Jonas said, 'And?'

'Inconclusive, the doctor says.'

'Conclusive enough to come back.'

'The doctor says he came back because of the men in the cars.'

Nobody spoke.

Jacob said, 'But in the interests of full disclosure, the doctor also claims Reacher asked Mrs Coe if she really wants to be told what happened to her daughter.'

'Reacher can't possibly know. Not yet.'

'I agree. But he might be beginning to pull on threads.'

'Then we have to kill him now. We have to.'

'It's just one more day. He's locked up. Escape is impossible.'

More silence.

Nobody spoke.

Then Jonas asked, 'Anything else?'

'Eleanor helped Reacher get past the sentry,' Jacob said. 'She defied her husband and left his house, quite brazenly. She and Reacher conspired together to decoy the boy away from his post. He didn't perform well. We'll have to fire him, of course. We'll leave Seth to decide what happens to his wife. And it seems that Seth has broken his hand. He'll need some attention. It appears Reacher has a very hard head. And that's all the news I have.'

Nobody spoke.

Jacob said, 'We need to make a decision about the immediate matter at hand. Life or death. Always the ultimate choice.'

No reply.

Jacob asked, 'Who wants to go first?'

Nobody spoke.

Jacob said, 'Then I'll go first. I vote to let my boy do it his way. I vote to keep Reacher concealed until our truck is close by. It's a minor increase in risk. One more day, that's all. Overall, it's insignificant. And I like finesse. I like a measure of elegance in a solution.'

A long pause.

Then Jasper said, 'I'm in.'

And Jonas said, 'OK,' a little reluctantly.

Reacher woke up in a concrete room full of bright light. He was on his back on the floor, at the foot of a flight of steep stairs. He had been carried down, he figured, not thrown or fallen. Because the back of his skull was OK. He had no sprains or bruises. His limbs were intact, all four of them. He could see and hear and move. His face hurt like hell, but that was to be expected.

The lights were regular incandescent household bulbs, six or eight of them, randomly placed, maybe a hundred watts each. No shades. The concrete was smooth and pale grey. Very fine. Not dusty. It was like an engineering product. High strength. It had been poured with great precision. There were no seams. The angles where the walls met each other and the floor were chamfered and radiused, just slightly. Like a swimming pool, ready for tiling. Reacher had dug swimming pools once. Temporary employment, many years ago. He had seen them in all their different stages of completion.

His face hurt like hell.

Was he in a half-finished swimming pool? Unlikely. Unless it had a temporary roof. The roof was boards laid over heavy joists. The joists were made of multi-ply wood. Manufactured articles. Very strong. Layers of exotic hardwoods, probably glued together with resins under enormous pressure in a giant press in a factory. Probably cut with computer-controlled saws. Delivered on a flat-bed truck. Craned into place. Each one probably weighed a lot.

His face hurt.

He felt confused. He had no idea what time it was. The clock in his head had stopped. He was breathing through his mouth. His nose was jammed solid with blood and swellings. He could feel blood on his lips and his chin. It was thick and almost dry. A nosebleed. Not surprising. Maybe thirty minutes old. Not like Eleanor Duncan's. His own blood clotted fast. It always had. He was the exact opposite of a haemophiliac. A good thing, from time to time. An evolutionary trait, no doubt bred into him through many generations of natural-born survivors.

His face hurt.

There were other things in the concrete room. There were pipes of all different diameters. There were green metal boxes a little crusted with mineral stains. Some wires, some in steel conduit, some loose. There were no windows. Just the walls. And the stairs, with a closed door at the top.

He was underground.

Was he in a bunker of some sort?

He didn't know.

His face hurt like hell. And it was getting worse. Much, much worse. Huge waves of pain were pulsing out between his eyes, behind his nose, boring straight back into his head, one with every heartbeat, bumping and grinding, lapping out into his skull and bouncing around and then fading and receding just in time to be replaced by the next. Bad pain. But he could fight it. He could fight anything. He had been fighting since he was five years old. If there was nothing to fight, he would fight himself. Not that there had ever been a shortage of targets. He had fought his own battles, and his brother's. A family responsibility. Not that his brother had been a coward. Far from it. Nor weak. His brother had been big too. But he had been a rational boy. Gentle, even. Always a disadvantage. Someone would start something, and Joe would waste the first precious second thinking, Why? Reacher never did that. Never. He used the first precious second landing the first precious blow. Fight, and win. Fight, and win.

His face hurt like hell. He looked at the pain, and he set himself apart from it. He saw it, examined it, identified it, corralled it. He isolated it. He challenged it. You against me? Dream on, pal. He built borders for it. Then walls. He built walls and forced the pain behind them and then he moved the walls inward, compressing the pain, crushing it, boxing it in, limiting it, beating it.

Not beating it.

It was beating him.

It was exploding, like bombs on timers, one, two, three. Relentlessly. Everlastingly, with every beat of his heart. It was never going to stop, until his heart stopped. It was insane. In the past he had been wounded with shrapnel and shot in the chest and cut with knives. This was worse. Much worse. This was worse than all of his previous sufferings put together.

Which made no sense. No sense at all. Something was wrong. He had seen busted noses before. Many times. No fun, but nobody made a gigantic fuss about them. Nobody looked like grenades were going off in his head. Not even Seth Duncan. People got up, maybe spat a little, winced, walked it off.

He raised his hand to his face. Slowly. He knew it would be like shooting himself in the head. But he had to know. Because something was wrong. He touched his nose. He gasped, loud and sudden, like an explosive curse, pain and fury and disgust.

The ridge of bone on the front of his nose was broken clean off. It had been driven around under the tight web of skin and cartilage to the side. It was pinned there, like a mountaintop sliced off and reattached to a lower slope.

It hurt like hell.

Maybe the Remington's butt had a metal binding. Brass, or steel. Reinforcement against wear and tear. He hadn't noticed. He knew he had turned his head at the last split second, as much as he could against the resistance of the sweaty palm clamped on his forehead. He had wanted as much of a side-on impact as he could get. Better than head-on. A head-on impact could drive shards of loose bone into the brain.

He closed his eyes.

He opened them again.

He knew what he had to do.

He had to reset the break. He knew that. He knew the costs and the benefits. The pain would lessen, and he would end up with a normal-looking nose. Almost. But he would pass out again. No question about that. Touching the injury with a gentle fingertip had nearly taken his head off at the neck. Like shooting himself. Fixing it would be like machine-gunning himself.

He closed his eyes. The pain battered at him. He laid his head gently on the concrete. No point in falling back and cracking his skull as well. He raised his hand. He grasped the knob of bone, finger and thumb. Atom bombs went off in his head. He pushed and pulled.

No result. The cartilage was clamping too hard. Like a web of miniature elastic straps, holding the damn thing in place. In completely the wrong place. He blinked water out of his eyes and tried again. He pushed and pulled. Thermonuclear devices exploded.

No result.

He knew what he had to do. Steady pressure was not working. He had to smack the knob of bone back into place with the heel of his hand. He had to think hard and set it up and be decisive. Like a chiropractor wrestling a spine, jerking suddenly, listening for the sudden click.

He rehearsed the move. He needed to hit low down on the angle of cheek and nose, with the side of his hand, the lower part, opposite the ball of his thumb, like a karate chop, a semi-glancing blow, upward and sideways and outward. He needed to drive the peak back up the mountainside. It would settle OK. Once it arrived, the skin and the cartilage would keep it in place.

He opened his eyes. He couldn't get an angle. Not down there on the floor. His elbow got in the way. He dragged himself across the smooth concrete, palms and heels pushing, five feet, ten, and he sat up against a wall, half reclining, his neck bent, space for his elbows in the void under his angled back. He squared his shoulders and his hips and he got as settled and as stable as he could, so that he wouldn't fall far, or even at all.

Show time.

He touched the heel of his hand to where it had to go. He let it feel what it had to do. He practised the move. The top of his palm would skim his eyebrow. Like a guide.

On three, he thought.

One.

Two.

CRACK

BLACK