“You get Walker?” he asked.
“He’s up to speed,” she said. “He wants us to wait for him here, for when he’s through with the FBI.”
Reacher shook his head. “Can’t wait here. Too obvious. We need to stay on the move. We’ll go to him, and then we’ll get back on the road.”
She paused a beat. “Are we in serious danger?”
“Nothing we can’t handle,” he said.
She said nothing.
“You worried?” he asked.
“A little,” she said. “A lot, actually.”
“You can’t be,” he said. “I’m going to need your help.”
“Why was the lie about the ring different?”
“Because everything else is hearsay. But I found out for myself the ring wasn’t a fake. Direct personal discovery, not hearsay. Feels very different.”
“I don’t see how it’s important.”
“It’s important because I’ve got a whole big theory going and the lie about the ring screws it up like crazy.”
“Why do you want to believe her so much?”
“Because she had no money with her.”
“What’s the big theory?”
“Remember that Balzac quotation? And Marcuse?”
Alice nodded.
“I’ve got another one,” Reacher said. “Something Ben Franklin once wrote.”
“What are you, a walking encyclopedia?”
“I remember stuff I read, is all. And I remember something Bobby Greer said, too, about armadillos.”
She just looked at him.
“You’re crazy,” she said.
He nodded. “It’s only a theory. It needs to be tested. But we can do that.”
“How?”
“We just wait and see who comes for us.”
She said nothing.
“Let’s go check in with Walker,” he said.
They walked through the heat to the courthouse building. There was a breeze again, blowing in from the south. It felt damp and urgent. Walker was on his own in his office, looking very tired. His desk was a mess of phone books and paper.
“Well, it’s started,” he said. “Biggest thing you ever saw. FBI and state police, roadblocks everywhere, helicopters in the air, more than a hundred and fifty people on the ground. But there’s a storm coming in, which ain’t going to help.”
“Reacher thinks they’re holed up in a motel,” Alice said.
Walker nodded, grimly. “If they are, they’ll find them. Manhunt like this, it’s going to be pretty relentless.”
“You need us anymore?” Reacher asked.
Walker shook his head. “We should leave it to the professionals now. I’m going home, grab a couple hours rest.”
Reacher looked around the office. The door, the floor, the windows, the desk, the filing cabinets.
“I guess we’ll do the same thing,” he said. “We’ll go to Alice’s place. Call us if you need us. Or if you get any news, O.K.?”
Walker nodded.
“I will,” he said. “I promise.”
“We’ll go as FBI again,” the woman said. “It’s a no-brainer.”
“All of us?” the driver asked. “What about the kid?”
The woman paused. She had to go, because she was the shooter. And if she had to split the team two and one, she wanted the tall guy with her, not the driver.
“You stay with the kid,” she said.
There was a moment’s silence.
“Abort horizon?” the driver asked.
It was their standard operating procedure. Whenever the team was split, the woman set an abort horizon. Which meant that you waited until the time had passed, and then, if the team wasn’t together again, you got the hell out, every man for himself.
“Four hours, O.K.?” the woman said. “Done and dusted.”
She stared at him a second longer, eyebrows raised, to make sure he understood the implication of her point. Then she knelt and unzipped the heavy valise.
“So let’s do it,” she said.
They did the exact same things they had done for Al Eugene, except they did them a whole lot faster because the Crown Vic was parked in the motel’s lot, not hidden in a dusty turnout miles from anywhere. The lot was dimly lit and mostly empty, and there was nobody around, but it still wasn’t a secure feeling. They pulled the wheel covers off and threw them in the trunk. They attached
the communications antennas to the rear window and the trunk lid. They zipped blue jackets over their shirts. They loaded up with spare ammunition clips. They squared the souvenir ballcaps on their heads. They checked the loads in their nine-millimeter pistols and racked the slides and clicked the safety catches and jammed the guns in their pockets. The tall fair man slipped into the driver’s seat. The woman paused outside the motel room door.