Never Go Back

‘Thermobaric devices more powerful than anything except nuclear weapons. Plenty of buyers in the Middle East for things like those. No doubt about that. And those buyers have plenty of money. No doubt about that, either.’

‘They’re thirty feet long. Kind of hard to slip in your coat pocket.’

‘Stranger things have happened.’

Then she went quiet, for a whole mile.

Reacher said, ‘What?’

‘Suppose this is government policy. We might be arming one faction against another. We do that all the time.’

Reacher said nothing.

Turner said, ‘You don’t see it that way?’

‘I can’t make it work deep down. The government can do whatever it wants. So why scam you with a hundred grand? Why didn’t you just disappear? And me? And Moorcroft? Why aren’t we in Guantanamo right now? Or dead? And why were the guys who came to the motel the first night so crap? That was no kind of government wet team. I barely had to break a sweat. And why would it get to that point in the first place? They could have backed you down some other way. They could have ordered you to pull Weeks and Edwards out of there. They could have ordered you to cease and desist.’

‘Not without automatically raising my suspicions. It would have put a big spotlight on the whole thing. That’s a risk they wouldn’t want to take.’

‘Then they’d have found a better way. They would have ordered a whole countrywide strategic pull-back, all the way to the Green Zone. For some made-up political reason. To respect the Afghans’ sovereignty, or some such thing. It would have been a tsunami of bullshit. Your guys would have been caught up in it along with everyone else, and you wouldn’t have thought twice about it. It would have been just one of those things. Same old shit.’

‘So you’re not convinced.’

‘This all feels amateur to me,’ Reacher said. ‘Correct, uptight, slightly timid people, somewhat out of their depth now, and therefore relying on somewhat undistinguished muscle to cover their collective asses. Which gives us one small problem and one big opportunity. The small problem being, those four guys know they have to get to us first, before the MPs or the FBI, because we’re in deep shit now, technically, with the escape and all, so the assumption is we’ll say anything to help with our situations. And even if no one believes us, it would all be out there as a possibility or a rumour, and these guys can’t afford any kind of extra scrutiny, even if it was half-assed and by the book. So that’s the small problem. Those four guys are going to stay hard on our tails. That’s for damn sure.’

‘And what’s the big opportunity?’

‘Those same four guys,’ Reacher said. ‘Their bosses will be lost without them. They’ll be cut off at the knees. They’ll be helpless and isolated. They’ll be ours for the taking.’

‘So that’s the plan?’ Turner said. ‘We’re going to let the four guys find us, and we’re going to bust them, and then we’re going to move on up from there?’

‘Except we’re not going to bust them,’ Reacher said. ‘We’re going to do to them what they were going to do to us.’

‘Which is what?’

‘We’re going to put them in the ground. And then we’re going to listen out for their bosses howling in the void. And then we’re going to explain to them carefully why it’s a very bad idea to mess with the 110th.’

THIRTY-ONE

THEY CROSSED THE line into Grant County, and the lonely hill road ran on unchanging, mile after mile. The speedometer was drifting between fifty and sixty, up and down, but the gas gauge was moving one way only, and fast. Then a sign on the shoulder announced the Grant County Airport twenty miles ahead, and a town named Petersburg.

Turner said, ‘A place with an airport has to have a gas station, right? And a motel. And a place with an airport and a gas station and a motel has to have a diner.’

Reacher said, ‘And a police department.’

‘Hope for the best.’

‘I always do,’ Reacher said.

They hit the town before the airport. It was mostly asleep. But not completely. They came out of the hills and merged left on to a state road that became North Main Street a hundred yards later, with built-up blocks on the left and the right. In the centre of town there was a crossroads with Route 220, which was the road they had avoided earlier. After the crossroads North Main Street became South Main Street. The airport lay to the west, not far away. There was no traffic, but some windows had lights behind them.

Turner went south, across the narrow Potomac again, and she took a right, towards the airport, which was a small place for light planes only, and was all closed up and dark. So she U-turned, kerb to kerb, and headed back, across the river again, towards the downtown crossroads.

Reacher said, ‘Go right on 220. I bet that’s where the good stuff is.’