Without Fail - Lee Child [163]
“It was a cattle town, I guess,” Neagley said. “They brought the railroad in as far as Casper, through Douglas. They must have driven the herds sixty, seventy miles south and picked it up there.”
“So what do they do now?” Reacher asked.
The town wobbled in the scope as he spoke.
“No idea,” she said. “Maybe they all invest on-line.”
He passed her the scope and she refocused and stared down through it. He watched the lens move fractionally up and down and side to side as she covered the whole area.
“They’ll set up to the south,” she said. “All the preservice activity will happen south of the church. They’ve got a couple of old barns a hundred yards out, and some natural cover.”
“How will they aim to get away?”
The scope moved an eighth of an inch, to the right.
“They’ll expect roadblocks north and south,” she said. “Local cops. That’s a no-brainer. Their badges might get them through, but I wouldn’t be counting on it. This is a whole different situation. There might be confusion, but there won’t be crowds.”
“So how?”
“I know how I’d do it,” she said. “I’d ignore the roads altogether. I’d take off across the grass, due west. Forty miles of open country in some big four-wheel-drive, and you hit the highway. I doubt the Casper PD has got a helicopter. Or the Highway Patrol. There are only two highways in the whole state.”
“Armstrong will come in a helicopter,” Reacher said. “Probably from some Air Force base in Nebraska.”
“But they won’t use his helicopter to chase the bad guys. They’ll be exfiltrating him or taking him to a hospital. I’m sure that’s some kind of standard protocol.”
“Highway Patrol would set up north and south on the highway. They’ll have nearly an hour’s warning.”
Neagley lowered the scope and nodded. “I’d anticipate that. So I’d drive straight across the highway and get back off-road. West of the highway is ten thousand square miles of nothing between Casper and the Wind River Reservation, with only one major road through it. They’d be long gone before somebody whistled up a helicopter and started the search.”
“That’s a bold plan.”
“I’d go for it,” Neagley said.
Reacher smiled. “I know you would. Question is, will these guys? I’m wondering if they’ll take one look and turn around and forget about it.”
“Doesn’t matter. We’ll take them down while they’re looking. We don’t need to catch them in the act.”
Reacher climbed back into the driver’s seat.
“Let’s go to work,” he said.
The bowl was very shallow. They lost maybe a hundred feet of elevation in the twenty miles they drove before they reached the town. The road was hard-packed dirt, smooth as glass, beautifully scraped and contoured. An annual art, Reacher guessed, performed anew every year when the winter snows melted and the spring rains finished. It was the kind of road Model T Fords rolled down in documentary films. It curved as it approached the town so that the bridge could cross the river at an exact right angle.
The bridge seemed to represent the geographic center of town. There was a general store that offered postal service and a breakfast counter. There was a forge set back behind it that had probably fixed ranch machinery way back in history. There was a feed supplier’s office and a hardware store. There was a one-pump gas station with a sign that read: Springs Repaired . There were sidewalks made of wood fronting the buildings. They ran like boat docks, floating on the earth. There was a quiet leathery man loading groceries into a pickup bed.
“They won’t come here,” Reacher said. “This is the most exposed place I’ve ever seen.”
Neagley shook her head. “They won’t know that until they’ve seen it for themselves. They might be in and out in ten minutes, but ten minutes is all we need.”
“Where are we going to stay?”
She pointed. “Over there.”
There was a plain-fronted red cedar building with numerous small windows and a sign that read: Clean Rooms.
“Terrific,” Reacher said.
“Drive around,” Neagley said. “Let’s get a feel for the place.”
A letter K has only four options for exploration, and they had already covered the