He put his back against the blind gable wall and settled in and waited. He could smell woodsmoke from the kitchen chimney. After a minute his eyesight adjusted and he saw that there was a little moonlight behind heavy cloud, maybe one shade lighter than total darkness. But still comforting. Nobody would see him from a distance. He was wearing gray pants and a gray jacket and he was leaning on a gray wall holding a black gun. In turn he would see headlights miles away and he would see men on foot about ten feet away. Close quarters. But at night, vision was not the sense that counted anyway. In the darkness, hearing was primary. Sound was the best early-warning system. Reacher himself could be totally silent, because he wasn't moving. But no intruder could be. Intruders had to move.
He stepped forward two paces and stood still. Turned his head slowly left and right and scoped out a two-hundred-degree arc all around him, like a huge curved bubble of space from which he had to be aware of every sound. Assuming that Pauling was doing the same thing north of the house they had every angle of approach covered between them. At first he heard nothing. Just an absolute absence of sound. Like a vacuum. Like he was deaf. Then as he relaxed and concentrated he started to pick up tiny imperceptible sounds drifting in across the flat land. The thrill of faint breezes in distant trees. The hum of power lines a mile away. The soak of water turning earth to mud in ditches. Grains of dirt drying and falling into furrows. Field mice, in burrows. Things growing. He turned his head left and right like radar and knew that any human approach might as well be accompanied by a marching band. He would hear it clearly a hundred yards away, however quiet anyone tried to be.
Reacher, alone in the dark. Armed and dangerous. Invincible.
He stood in the same spot for five straight hours. It was cold, but bearable. Nobody came. By six-thirty in the morning the sun was showing far away to his left. There was a bright horizontal band of pink in the sky. A thick horizontal blanket of mist on the ground. Gray visibility was spreading westward slowly, like an ebb tide.
The dawn of a new day.
The time of maximum danger.
Taylor and Jackson came out of the house carrying the third and fourth rifles. Reacher didn't speak. Just took up a new station against the rear façade of the house, his shoulder against the corner, facing south. Taylor mirrored his position against the front wall. Reacher knew without looking that sixty feet behind them Jackson and Pauling were doing the same thing. Four weapons, four pairs of eyes, all trained outward.
Reasonable security.
For as long as they could bear to stay in position.
Chapter 70
THEY STAYED IN position all day long. All through the morning and all through the afternoon and well into the evening. Fourteen straight hours.
Lane didn't come.
One at a time they took short meal breaks and shorter bathroom breaks. They rotated stations clockwise around the house for variety. Their eight-pound rifles started to feel like eight tons in their hands. Jackson slipped away for a minute and turned the bird scarer back on. Thereafter the stillness was periodically shattered by loud random shotgun blasts. Even though they knew for sure they were due each sentry jumped and ducked each time they arrived.
Lane didn't come.
Kate and Jade stayed in the house, out of sight. They made food and poured drinks and carried them on trays to the windows and the doors, tea for Taylor and Jackson, coffee for Reacher, orange juice for Pauling. The sun burned through the mist and the day grew warm, and then it grew cold again in the late afternoon.
Lane didn't come.
Jade drew pictures. Every twenty minutes or so she would bring a new one to a different window and ask for an opinion concerning its merit. When it was his turn to judge, Reacher would duck his head down and give the paper a look. Then he would turn back to the outward view and talk out of the side of his mouth. Very good, he would say. And generally the pictures merited the praise. The kid wasn't a bad little artist. She had switched from future predictions to straightforward reportage. She drew the red Mini Cooper, she drew Pauling with her gun, she drew Taylor with a mouth like a wrecked Buick's grille. She drew Reacher, huge, taller than the house. Then late in the day she switched from reportage to fantasy and drew farm animals in the barns, even though she had been told that the Jacksons didn't have any, not even a dog.
Lane didn't come.
Kate fixed sandwiches for an early dinner and Jade took to visiting the corner windows and asking everyone in turn if she could come outside and explore. Everyone in turn said no, she had to hide. On the third go-round Reacher heard her modify her request and ask Taylor if she could come out after dark, and he heard Taylor say maybe, like worn-down parents everywhere.
Lane didn't come.
By eight-thirty in the evening visibility had died away to nothing again and Reacher had been on his feet for nineteen hours. Pauling too. Taylor and Jackson had done twenty-four, spelled only by a five-hour break. They all met in a loose huddle in the gathering gloom by the front door, shaky with fatigue, frustrated, made anxious by fruitless vigilance.
Taylor said, "He's waiting us out."
"Therefore he's going to win," Jackson said. "We can't keep this up much longer."
"He's had twenty-seven hours," Pauling said. "We have to assume he's armed by now."
"He'll come tomorrow at dawn," Taylor said.
"You sure?" Reacher asked.
"Not really."
"Me either. Three or four in the morning would work just as well."
"Too dark."
"If they've bought guns they could have bought night vision, too."
"How would you do it?"
"Three guys loop around and walk in from the north. The other four come up the driveway, maybe two in a car, lights off, high speed, with the other two flanking it on foot. Two directions, seven guys, their choice of seven windows, we couldn't stop at least three of them getting inside. They'd get you or a hostage before we could react."
"You're a real ray of sunshine," Taylor said.
"I'm just trying to think like them."
"We'd get them before they got anywhere near the house."
"Only if all four of us can stay awake and alert for the next eight hours. Or the next thirty-two hours, if he delays another day. Or the next fifty-six hours, if he delays two days. Which he might. He's in no hurry. And he's not dumb. If he's decided to wait us out, why not do it properly?"
Taylor said, "We're not moving. This place is a stronghold."
"Three-dimensionally it's fine," Reacher said. "But battles are fought in four dimensions, not three. Length, breadth, and height, plus time. And time is on Lane's side, not ours. This is a siege now. We're going to run out of food, and sooner or later all four of us are going to be asleep at the same time."
"So we'll halve the guard. One man north, one man south, the other two resting but ready."
Reacher shook his head. "No, it's time to get aggressive."
"How?"
"I'm going to go find them. They've got to be holed up somewhere close. It's time to pay them a visit. They won't be expecting that."
"Alone?" Pauling said. "That's insane."
"I have to anyway," Reacher said. "I didn't get Hobart's money yet. There's eight hundred grand out there. Can't let it go to waste."
Taylor and Pauling stayed on guard and Reacher fetched the big Ordnance Survey map from the Mini's glove box. He took Jade's latest drawings off the kitchen table and piled them on a chair and spread out the map in their place. Then he went over it with Jackson. Jackson had a year's worth of local knowledge, which was less than Reacher would have liked, but it was better than nothing. The map clarified most of the terrain issues all by itself with its faint orange contour lines, which were very widely spaced and which curved only gently. Flat land, probably the flattest in the British Isles. Like a pool table. Grange Farm and Bishops Pargeter were roughly in the center of a wide triangle of empty space bounded to the east by the road that ran south from Norwich to Ipswich in Suffolk and to the west by the Thetford road that Reacher and Pauling had driven three times already. Elsewhere in the triangle were meandering minor tracks and isolated farm settlements. Here and there chance and history had nestled small communities in the angles of crossroads. They were shown on the map as tiny gray squares and rectangles. Some of the rectangles represented short rows of houses. Some of the larger buildings were shown individually. The only one within any kind of a reasonable distance from Bishops Pargeter and labeled PH was the Bishop's Arms.