this morning, they’d just gone on duty. Whichever one of them it is
must have gotten the fax and concealed it. But which one, I just don’t
know.”
Reacher nodded back.
“We could figure it out,” he said. “Or we could just wait and see. One
of them will be walking around best of friends and the other will be in
handcuffs, or dead. We’ll be able to tell the difference.”
McGrath nodded, sourly.
“I can’t wait,” he said.
Then Reacher stiffened and pulled him ten yards farther into the woods.
He had heard the patrol coming back through the trees.
Inside the courtroom, Borken had heard the three shots. He was sitting
in the judge’s chair and he heard them clearly. They went:
crack crack … crack and repeated a dozen times as each of the distant
slopes cannoned the echo back toward him. He sent a runner back to the
Bastion. A mile there, a mile back on the winding path through the
woods. Twenty minutes wasted, then the runner got back panting with
the news. Three corpses, four cut ropes.
“Readier,” Borken said. “I should have wasted him at the beginning.”
Milosevic nodded in agreement.
“I want him kept away from me,” he said. “I heard the autopsy report
on your friend Peter Bell. I just want my money and safe passage out
of here, OK?”
Borken nodded. Then he laughed. A sharp, nervous laugh that was part
excitement, part tension. He stood up and walked out from behind the
bench. Laughed and grinned and slapped Milosevic on the shoulder.
Holly Johnson knew no more than most people do about dynamite. She
couldn’t remember its exact chemical composition. She knew ammonium
nitrate and nitro cellulose were in there somewhere. She wondered
about nitroglycerin. Was that mixed in too? Or was that some other
kind of explosive? Either way, she figured dynamite was some kind of a
sticky fluid, soaked into a porous material and molded into sticks.
Heavy sticks, quite dense. If her walls were packed with heavy dense
sticks they would absorb a lot of sound. Like a soundproofing layer in
a city apartment. Which meant the shots she’d heard had been
reasonably close.
She’d heard: crack crack … crack. But she didn’t know who was
shooting at who, or why. They weren’t handgun shots. She knew the
flat bark of a handgun from her time at Quantico. These were shots
from a long gun. Not the heavy thump of the big Barratts from the
rifle range. A lighter weapon than that. Somebody firing a
medium-caliber rifle three times. Or three people firing once, in a
ragged volley. But whichever it was, something was happening. And she
had to be ready.
Garber heard the shots, too. Crack crack… crack, maybe a thousand
yards northwest of him, maybe twelve hundred. Then a dozen spaced
echoes coming back from the mountainsides. He was in no doubt about
what they represented. An M-16, firing singles, the first pair in a
tight group of two which the military called a double tap. The sound
of a competent shooter. The idea was to get the second round off
before the first shell case hit the ground. Then a third target, or
maybe an insurance shot into the second. An unmistakable rhythm. Like
a signature. The audible signature of somebody with hundreds of hours
of weapons training behind him. Garber nodded to himself and moved
forward through the trees.
“It must be Brogan,” Reacher whispered.
McGrath looked surprised.
“Why Brogan?” he asked.
They were squatted down, backs to adjacent trunks, thirty yards into
the woods, invisible. The search patrol had tracked back and missed
them again. McGrath had given Reacher the whole story. He had rattled
through the important parts of the investigation, one professional to
another, in a sort of insider’s shorthand. Reacher had asked sharp
questions and McGrath had given short answers.
Time and distance,” Reacher said. That was crucial. Think about it
from their point of view. They put us in the truck and they raced off
straight to Montana. What’s that? Maybe seventeen hundred miles?
Eighteen hundred?”
“Probably,” McGrath allowed.
“And Brogan’s a smart guy,” Reacher said. “And he knows you’re a smart