Without Fail - Lee Child [170]
“What do you think?” Neagley asked.
Reacher traced the square with his finger. Widened his radius and traced a hundred miles east, and north, and west, and south. “I think that in the whole history of the western United States no person has ever just passed through Grace, Wyoming. It’s inconceivable. Why would anybody? Any coherent journey south to north or east to west would miss it altogether. Casper to Wright, say. Bottom left to top right. You’d use I-25 east to Douglas and Route 59 north out of Douglas to Wright. Coming through Grace makes no sense at all. It saves no miles. It just slows you down, because it’s a dirt track. And would you even notice the track? Remember what it looked like at the north end? I thought it was going nowhere.”
“And we’ve got a hiker’s map,” Neagley said. “Maybe it’s not even on a regular road map.”
“So that truck passed through for a reason,” Reacher said. “Not by accident, not for the fun of it.”
“Those were the guys,” Neagley said.
Reacher nodded. “They were on their reconnaissance run.”
“I agree,” Neagley said. “But did they like what they saw?”
Reacher closed his eyes. What did they see? They saw a tiny town with no safe hiding places. A helicopter landing site just fifty yards from the church. And a black SUV that looked a little like an official Secret Service vehicle already parked on the road, big and obvious. With Colorado plates, and Denver was probably the nearest Secret Service Field Office.
“I don’t think they were turning cartwheels,” he said.
“So will they abort? Or will they come back?”
“Only one way to find out,” Reacher said. “We wait and see.”
They waited. The sun fell away into afternoon and the temperature dropped like a stone. The clock ticked 3,600 times every hour. Neagley went out for a walk and came back with a bag from the grocery store. They ate an improvised lunch. Then they developed a new lookout pattern based on the fact that no vehicle could get all the way through either field of view in less than about eight minutes. So they sat comfortably and every five minutes by Neagley’s watch they knelt up and shuffled over to their louvers and scanned the length of the road. Each time there was a small thrill of anticipation, and each time it was disappointed. But the regular physical movement helped against the cold. They started stretching in place, to keep loose. They did push-ups, to keep warm. The spare rounds in their pockets jingled loudly. Battle rattle, Neagley called it. From time to time Reacher pressed his face against the louvers and stared out at the snowfall in the west. The clouds were still low and black, held back by an invisible wall about fifty miles away.
“They won’t come back,” Neagley said. “They’d have to be insane to try anything here.”
“I think they are insane,” Reacher said.
He watched and waited, and listened to the clock. He had had enough just before four o’clock. He used the blade of his knife to cut through the accumulation of old white paint and lifted one of the louvers out of the frame. It was a simple length of wood, maybe three feet long, maybe four inches wide, maybe an inch thick. He held it out in front of him like a spear and crawled over and pushed it into the clock mechanism. The gear wheels jammed on it and the clock stopped. He pulled the wood out again and crawled away and slotted it back in the frame. The silence was suddenly deafening.
They watched and waited. It got colder, to the point where they both started shivering. But the silence helped. Suddenly, it helped a lot. Reacher crawled over and checked his partial view to the west again and then crawled back and picked up the map. Stared at it hard, lost in thought. He used his finger and thumb like a compass and measured distances. Forty, eighty, a hundred and twenty, a hundred and sixty miles. Slow, faster, fast, slow. Overall average speed maybe forty. That’s four hours.
“Sun