‘We’re brothers,’ the first guy said, irrelevantly.

  They both had broad strips of hospital gauze taped to their foreheads, stark white, a little longer and broader than the labels Reacher had stuck there. One of them had bandages on his hands. They were dressed identically in sweaters and golf pants. Without their bulky overcoats, they looked smaller. One guy was wearing boat shoes. The other was wearing moccasin slippers that looked like he’d made them himself from a mail-order kit. Reacher stared at them and felt his aggression drain away.

  ‘Shit,’ he said.

  They stared back at him.

  ‘Sit down,’ he said.

  They sat, side by side on the sofa. They watched him, with fearful eyes hooded under the ludicrous gauze.

  ‘Are these the right guys?’ Harper asked.

  Reacher nodded.

  ‘Things change, I guess,’ he said.

  ‘Petrosian’s dead,’ the first guy said.

  ‘We know that already,’ Reacher said back.

  ‘We don’t know nothing else,’ the second guy said.

  Reacher shook his head. ‘Don’t say that. You know plenty of things.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Like where Bellevue is.’

  The first guy looked nervous. ‘Bellevue?’

  Reacher nodded. ‘The hospital they took you to.’

  Both brothers looked at the wall.

  ‘You liked it there?’ Reacher asked.

  Neither one of them replied.

  ‘You want to go back there?’

  No reply.

  ‘Big emergency room there, right?’ Reacher said. ‘Good for fixing all kinds of things. Broken arms, broken legs, all kinds of injuries.’

  The brother with the bandaged hands was older. The spokesman.

  ‘What do you want?’ he said.

  ‘A trade.’

  ‘What for what?’

  ‘Information,’ Reacher said. ‘In exchange for not sending you back to Bellevue.’

  ‘OK,’ the guy said.

  Harper smiled. ‘That was easy.’

  ‘Easier than I thought it would be,’ Reacher said.

  ‘Things change,’ the guy said. ‘Petrosian’s dead.’

  ‘Those guns you had,’ Reacher said. ‘Where did you get them?’

  The guy was wary.

  ‘The guns?’ he said.

  ‘The guns,’ Reacher repeated. ‘Where did you get them?’

  ‘Petrosian gave them to us,’ the guy said.

  ‘Where did he get them from?’

  ‘We don’t know.’

  Reacher smiled and shook his head. ‘You can’t say that. You can’t just say we don’t know. It’s not convincing. You could say I don’t know, but you can’t answer for your brother. You can’t know for sure what he knows, can you?’

  ‘We don’t know,’ the guy said again.

  ‘They came from the Army,’ Reacher said.

  ‘Petrosian bought them,’ the guy said.

  ‘He paid for them,’ Reacher said.

  ‘He bought them.’

  ‘He arranged their purchase, I accept that.’

  ‘He gave them to us,’ the younger brother said.

  ‘Did they come in the mail?’

  The older brother nodded. ‘Yes, in the mail.’

  Reacher shook his head. ‘No, they didn’t. He sent you to pick them up someplace. Probably a whole consignment.’

  ‘He picked them up himself.’

  ‘No, he didn’t. He sent you. Petrosian wouldn’t go himself. He sent you, in that Mercedes you were using.’

  The brothers stared at the wall, thinking, like there was a decision to be made.

  ‘Who are you?’ the older one asked.

  ‘I’m nobody,’ Reacher said.

  ‘Nobody?’

  ‘Not a cop, not FBI, not ATF, not anybody.’

  No reply.

  ‘So there’s an upside and a downside here,’ Reacher said. ‘You tell me stuff, it stays with me. Doesn’t have to go any further. I’m interested in the Army, not you. The downside is, you don’t tell me, I’m not concerned with sending you off to court with all kinds of civil rights. I’m concerned with sending you back to Bellevue with all kinds of broken arms and legs.’

  ‘You INS?’ the guy asked.

  Reacher smiled. ‘Mislaid your green cards?’

  The brothers said nothing.

  ‘I’m not INS,’ Reacher said. ‘I told you, I’m not anything. I’m nobody. Just a guy who wants an answer. You tell me the answer, you can stay here as long as you want, enjoy the benefits of American civilization. But I’m getting impatient. Those shoes aren’t going to do it for ever.’

  ‘Shoes?’

  ‘I don’t want to hit a guy wearing slippers like that.’

  There was silence.

  ‘New Jersey,’ the older brother said. ‘Through the Lincoln Tunnel, there’s a roadhouse set back where Route 3 meets the Turnpike.’

  ‘What’s it called?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ the guy said. ‘Somebody’s Bar, is all I know. Mac something, like Irish.’

  ‘Who did you see in there?’

  ‘Guy called Bob.’

  ‘Bob what?’

  ‘Bob, I don’t know. We didn’t exchange business cards or anything. Petrosian just told us Bob.’

  ‘A soldier?’

  ‘I guess. I mean, he wasn’t in uniform or nothing. But he had real short hair.’

  ‘How does it go down?’

  ‘You go in the bar, you find him, you give him the cash, he takes you in the parking lot and gives you the stuff out of the trunk of his car.’

  ‘A Cadillac,’ the other guy said. ‘An old DeVille, some dark colour.’

  ‘How many times?’

  ‘Three.’

  ‘What stuff?’

  ‘Berettas. Twelve each trip.’

  ‘What time of day?’

  ‘Evening time, around eight o’clock.’

  ‘You have to call him ahead?’

  The younger brother shook his head.

  ‘He’s always in there by eight o’clock,’ he said. ‘That’s what Petrosian told us.’

  Reacher nodded.

  ‘So what does Bob look like?’ he asked.

  ‘Like you,’ the older brother said. ‘Big and mean.’

  TWENTY-THREE

  The law provides that a narcotics conviction can be accompanied by confiscation of assets, which means that the DEA in New York City ends up with more automobiles than it can possibly ever need, so it loans out the surplus to other law enforcement agencies, including the FBI. The FBI uses those vehicles when it needs some anonymous transport that doesn’t look like government issue. Or when it needs to preserve some respectable distance between itself and some unspecified activity taking place. Therefore James Cozo withdrew the Bureau’s sedan and the services of its driver and tossed Harper the keys to a black one-year-old Nissan Maxima currently parked in the back row of the underground lot.

  ‘Have fun,’ he said again.

  Harper drove. It was the first time she had driven in New York City, and she was nervous about it. She threaded around a couple of blocks and got headed south on Fifth and motored slowly, with the taxis plunging and darting and honking around her.

  ‘OK, what now?’ she said.

  Now we waste some time, Reacher thought.

  ‘Bob’s not around until eight,’ he said. ‘We’ve got the whole afternoon to kill.’

  ‘I feel like we should be doing something.’

  ‘No rush,’ Reacher said. ‘We’ve got three weeks.’

  ‘So what do we do?’

  ‘First we eat,’ Reacher said. ‘I missed breakfast.’

  You’re happy to miss breakfast because you need to be sure. The way you predict it, it’s going to be a straight half-each split between the local police department and the Bureau, with changeovers at eight in the evening and eight in the morning. You saw it happen at eight in the evening yesterday, so now you’re back bright and early to see it happen again at eight this morning. Missing a crummy help-yourself-in-the-lobby motel breakfast is a small price to pay for that kind of certainty. So is the long, long drive into position. You’re not dumb enough to rent a room anywhere close by.

  And you’re not dumb enough to take a direct route, either. You wind your way through the mountains and leave your car on a gravel turnout a half-mile from your spot. The car is safe enough there. The only reason they built the turnout in the first place is that assholes are always leaving their cars there while they go watching eagles or scrambling over rocks or hiking up and down. A rental car parked neatly on the gravel is as invisible as the ski bags on the airport carousel. Just part of the scenery.

  You climb away from the road up a small hill maybe a hundred feet high. There are scrawny trees all over the place, a little more than shoulder-high. They have no leaves, but the terrain keeps you concealed. You’re in a kind of wide trench. You step left and right to pass tumbled boulders. At the top of the hill you follow the ridge to the left. You duck low as the ground starts to fall away on the other side. You drop to your knees and shuffle forward to where two giant rocks rest on each other, giving a wonderful random view of the valley through the triangle they make between them. You lean your right shoulder on the right-hand rock and Lieutenant Rita Scimeca’s house slides into the exact centre of your field of view, just a little more than two hundred yards away.

  The house is slightly north and west of your position, so you’re getting a full frontal of the street side. It’s maybe three hundred feet down the mountain, so the whole thing is laid out like a plan. The Bureau car is right there, parked outside. A clean Buick, dark blue. One agent in it. You use your field glasses. The guy is still awake. His head is upright. He’s not looking around much. Just staring forward, bored out of his skull. You can’t blame him. Twelve hours through the night, in a place where the last big excitement was somebody’s Christmas bake sale.

  It’s cold in the hills. The rock is sucking heat out of your shoulder. There’s no sun. Just sullen clouds stacked up over the giant peaks. You turn away for a moment and pull on your gloves. Pull your muffler up over the lower half of your face. Partly for the warmth, partly to break up the clouds of steam your breathing is creating in the air. You turn back. Move your feet and squirm around. Get comfortable. You raise the glasses again.

  The house has a wire fence all the way around the perimeter of the yard. There’s an opening onto a driveway. The driveway is short. A single garage door stands at the end of it, under the end of the front porch. There’s a path off the driveway that loops around through some neat rockery planting to the front door. The Bureau car is parked at the sidewalk right across the driveway opening, just slightly up the hill from dead centre. Facing down the rise. That puts the driver’s line of vision directly in line with the mouth of the path. Intelligent positioning. If you walk up the hill to the house, he sees you coming all the way. You come on him from behind, he maybe spots you in his mirror, and he sees you for certain as soon as you pass him by. Then he gets a clear back view all the way as you walk up the looping path. Intelligent positioning, but that’s the Bureau for you.

  You see movement a half-mile to the west and two hundred feet further down the mountain. A black-and-white Crown Victoria, nosing through a right-angle turn. Prowling, slow. It snuffles through the turns and enters her road. A cloud of white vapour trails from the tail pipe. The engine is cold. The car has been parked up all night behind a quiet station house. It comes up the street and slows and stops flank to flank with the Buick. The cars are a foot apart. You don’t see it for sure but you know the windows are buzzing down. Greetings are being exchanged. Information is being passed on. It’s all quiet, the Bureau guy is saying. Have a nice day, he’s adding. The local cop is grunting. Pretending to be bored, while secretly he’s thrilled to have an important mission. Maybe the first he’s ever had. See you later, the Bureau guy is saying.

  The black-and-white moves up the hill and turns in the road. The Buick’s engine starts and the car lurches as the agent slams it into drive. The black-and-white noses in behind it. The Buick moves away down the hill. The black-and-white rolls forward and stops. Exactly where the Buick was, inch for inch. It bounces twice on its springs and settles. The motor stops. The white vapour drifts and disappears. The cop turns his head to the right and gets exactly the same view of the path the Bureau guy had gotten. Maybe not such a dumb-ass, after all.

  Harper drove the Maxima into a commercial parking garage on West 9th Street, right after Reacher told her the grid pattern was about to finish and the street layout was about to get messy. They walked back east and south and found a bistro with a view of Washington Square Park. The waitress had a copy of a digest-sized philosophy journal to lean her order pad on. A student from NYU, making ends meet. The air was cold, but the sun was out. The sky was blue.

  ‘I like it here,’ Harper said. ‘Great city.’

  ‘I told Jodie I’m selling the house,’ Reacher said.

  She looked across at him. ‘She OK with that?’

  He shrugged. ‘She’s worried. I don’t see why. It makes me a happier person, how can that worry her?’

  ‘Because it makes you a footloose person.’

  ‘It won’t change anything.’

  ‘So why do it?’

  ‘That’s what she said.’

  Harper nodded. ‘She would. People do things for a reason, right? So she’s thinking, what’s the reason here?’

  ‘Reason is I don’t want to own a house.’

  ‘But reasons have layers. That’s only the top layer. She’s asking herself, OK, why doesn’t he want to own a house?’

  ‘Because I don’t want the hassle. She knows that. I told her.’

  ‘Bureaucratic type of hassle?’

  He nodded. ‘It’s a big pain in the ass.’

  ‘Yes, it is. A real big pain in the ass. But she’s thinking bureaucratic hassle is just a kind of symbol for something else.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Like wanting to be footloose.’

  ‘You’re just going around in a circle.’

  ‘I’m just telling you how she’s thinking.’

  The philosophy student brought coffee and Danish. Left a check written out in a neat, academic hand. Harper picked it up.

  ‘I’ll take care of it,’ she said.

  ‘OK,’ Reacher said.

  ‘You need to convince her,’ Harper said. ‘You know, make her believe you’re going to stick around, even though you’re selling the house.’

  ‘I told her I’m selling my car, too,’ he said.

  She nodded. ‘That might help. Sounds like a stickaround thing to do.’

  He paused for a beat.

  ‘I told her I might travel a little,’ he said.

  She stared at him. ‘Christ, Reacher, that’s not very reassuring, is it?’

  ‘She travels. She’s been to London twice this year. I didn’t make a big fuss about it.’

  ‘How much do you plan to travel?’

  He shrugged again. ‘I don’t know. A little, I guess. I like getting around. I really do. I told you that.’

  Harper was quiet for a second.

  ‘You know what?’ she said. ‘Before you convince her you’re going to stick around, maybe you should convince yourself.’

  ‘I am convinced.’

  ‘Are you? Or do you figure you’ll be in and out, as and when?’

  ‘In and out a little, I guess.’

  ‘You’ll drift apart.’

  ‘That’s what she said.’

  Harper nodded. ‘Well, I’m not surprised.’

  He said nothing. Just drank his coffee and ate his Danish.

  ‘It’s make-your-mind-up time,’ Harper said. ‘On the road or off the road, you can’t do both together.’

  His lunch break will be the first big test. That’s your preliminary conclusion. At first you wondered about bathroom arrangements, but he just went inside and used hers. He got out of the car after about ninety minutes, after his morning coffee had worked its way through. He stood stretching on the sidewalk. Then he walked up the looping path and rang on the doorbell. You adjusted the focus on the field glasses and got a pretty good side view. You didn’t see her. She stayed in the house. You saw his body language, a little awkward, a little embarrassed. He didn’t speak. He didn’t ask. Just presented himself at the door. So the arrangement had been set up ahead of time. Tough on Scimeca, you think to yourself, psychologically speaking. A raped woman, random intrusion of a large male person for some explicit penis-based activity. But it happened smoothly enough. He went in, and the door closed, a minute passed, the door opened again, and he came back out. He walked back to the car, looking around some, paying attention. He opened the car door, slid inside, and the scene went back to normal.

  So, no opportunity with the bathroom breaks. His lunch break would be the next chance. No way the guy is going twelve hours without eating. Cops are always eating. That’s your experience. Doughnuts, pastries, coffee, steak and eggs. Always eating.

  Harper wanted a view of the city. She was like a tourist. Reacher walked her south through Washington Square Park and all the way down West Broadway to the World Trade Center. It was about a mile and three-quarters. They sauntered slowly and spent fifty minutes doing it. The sky was bright and cold and the city was teeming. Harper was enjoying it.

  ‘We could go up to the restaurant,’ Reacher said. ‘Bureau could buy me lunch.’

  ‘I just bought you lunch,’ Harper said.

  ‘No, that was a late breakfast.’

  ‘You’re always eating,’ she said.

  ‘I’m a big guy,’ he said. ‘I need nutrition.’

  They checked their coats in the lobby and rode up to the top of the building. Waited in line at the restaurant desk, with Harper pressed up against the wall of windows, gazing out at the view. She showed her badge and they got a table for two, right at a window facing directly back up West Broadway and Fifth Avenue beyond, from a quarter-mile high.

  ‘Awesome,’ she said.

  It was awesome. The air was crisp and clear and the view extended a hundred miles. The city was khaki far below them in the fall light. Packed, intricate, infinitely busy. The rivers were green and grey. The outer boroughs faded into Westchester and Connecticut and Long Island. The other direction, New Jersey crowded the bank and curved away in the far distance.