“Surveillance,” he said suddenly.
“What about surveillance?”
“We’re assuming the guy watches the houses first, aren’t we? At least a full day? He might have already been hiding out somewhere, right when we were there.”
She shivered. “Creepy. But so what?”
“So you should check motel registers, canvass the neighborhood. Follow up. That’s how you’re going to do this, by working. Not by trying to do magic five floors underground in Virginia.”
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“There was no neighborhood. You saw the place. We’ve got nothing to work on. I keep on telling you that.”
“And I keep on telling you there’s always something to work on.”
“Yeah, yeah, he’s very smart, the paint, the geography, the quiet scenes.”
“Exactly. I’m not kidding. Those four things will lead you to him, sure as anything. Did Blake go to Spokane?”
She nodded. “We’re meeting him at the scene.”
“So he’s going to have to do what I tell him, or I’m not sticking around.”
“Don’t push it, Reacher. You’re Army liaison, not an investigator. And he’s pretty desperate. He can make you stick around.”
“He’s fresh out of threats.”
She made a face. “Don’t count on it. Deerfield and Cozo are working on getting those Chinese boys to implicate you. They’ll ask INS to check for illegals, whereupon they’ll find about a thousand in the restaurant kitchens alone. Whereupon they’ll start talking about deportations, but they’ll also mention that a little cooperation could make the problem go away, whereupon the big guys in the tongs will tell those kids to spill whatever beans we want them to spill. Greatest good for the greatest number, right?”
Reacher made no reply.
“Bureau always gets what it wants,” Harper said.
\
But the problem with sitting there rerunning it like a video over and over again is that little doubts start to creep in. You go over it and over it and you can’t remember if you really did all the things you should have done. You sit there all alone, thinking, thinking, thinking, and it all goes a little blurry and the more you question it, the less sure you get. One tiny little detail. Did you do it? Did you say it? You know you did at the Callan house. You know that for sure. And at Caroline Cooke’s place. Yes, definitely. You know that for sure, too. And at Lorraine Stanley’s place in San Diego. But what about Alison Lamarr’s place? Did you do it? Or did you make her do it? Did you say it? Did you?
You’re completely sure you did, but maybe that’s just in the rerun. Maybe that’s the pattern kicking in and making you assume something happened because it always happened before. Maybe this time you forgot. You become terribly afraid about it. You become sure you forgot. You think hard. And the more you think about it, the more you’re sure you didn’t do it yourself. Not this time. That’s OK, as long
\
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as you told her to do it for you. But did you? Did you tell her? Did you say the words? Maybe you didn’t. What then?
You shake yourself and tell yourself to calm down. A person of your superhuman talent, unsure and confused? Ridiculous. Absurd! So you put it out of your mind. But it won’t go away. It nags at you. It gets bigger and bigger, louder and louder. You end up sitting all alone, cold and sweating, absolutely sure you’ve made your first small mistake.
s/
/ {(f, Bureau’s own Learjet had ferried Blake and his team from Andrews direct to Spokane and he had sent it over to Sea-Tac to collect Harper and Readier. It was waiting on the apron right next to the Continental gates, and the same guy as before had been hauled out of the Seattle Field Office to meet them at the head of the jetway and point them down the external stairs and outside. It was raining lightly, and cold, so they ran for the Lear’s steps and hustled straight inside. Four minutes later, they were back in the air.
Sea-Tac to Spokane was a lot faster in the Lear than it had been in the Cessna. The same local guy in the same car was waiting for them. He still had Alison Lamarr’s address written on the pad attached to his windshield. He drove them the ten miles east toward Idaho and then turned north onto the narrow road into the hills. Fifty yards in, there was a roadblock with two parked cars and yellow tape stretched between trees. Above the trees in the far distance were the mountains. It was raining and gray on the western peaks, and in the east the sun was slanting down through the edge of the clouds and gleaming off the tiny threads of snow in the high gullies.