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“But suppose they weren’t. Suppose he was a con man whose job it was to get us in the van. But hey, nothing is that important. He’s a pro who wants to work again. He wasn’t sure what I was going to do next. I might have gone ballistic. He couldn’t risk attention. So he shut it down, because the cops happened to wander close, prowling around, looking for unusual behaviors. In other words, the guy covered his ass and ran.”

“Or he was a good soldier who spared you an hour in jail and himself an hour of paperwork by taking a deep breath and counting to ten and walking away.”

The plane turned onto the runway, amid noisy billows of dry brown air, and it accelerated slowly, complacently, as if fully aware the mysteries of flight had been worked out long ago, and it lifted off calmly, and glinted in the sun, and sideslipped in the haze, and curved upward on trails of soot, setting a dark but graceful course north and east.

Ten minutes later, twenty miles south of Mother’s Rest, the man with the ironed jeans and the blow-dried hair took the call on his land line. His contact said, “We’re going to put this right.”

“Put what right?”

“We got very unlucky.”

“What are you talking about?”

“There was a problem.”

“Did they get on the plane?”

At which point the contact went talkative again. Not from high spirits. From a bitter and incredulous should-have obsession. He said, “Hackett set it up perfectly. She booked the flight on the phone, so he had all the details. The timing was perfect. To the second. He watched them leave the motel, in a taxi. He was in the back of a Town Car by then, with a subcontractor driving, and they followed for a spell, and then they got alongside on the 405, and it was a total gimme, including she even had her window open, and the fast lane was moving well for the getaway, and a black Town Car on the road to LAX is invisible, because there are a million of them, so the shotgun was literally coming up, right then, point-blank range, but they got rear-ended by a Ferrari. Like getting kicked into next week, Hackett said. They never saw them again. You can’t move backward on a freeway.”

“So they’re on the plane?”

“It wasn’t the earliest flight. They chose it because she has a gold card. Hackett is ahead of them, by thirty-four minutes. I told you, we’re going to put this right.”

“In Chicago?”

“No extra charge. It wasn’t our Ferrari, but it is our reputation.”

“Don’t let them talk to McCann.”

“Understood. Our thoughts exactly.”

The flight was long. Not coast to coast, but basically transcontinental. A big slice, if not the whole thing. Chang had her seat reclined an inch, and her legs were stuck out straight, with her lace-up shoes under the seat in front. She was thinking, like he had seen her think before, behind the wheel of the little green Ford, on the long empty road to Oklahoma City. Sometimes half-smiling, and then half-grimacing, as positives and negatives ran through her mind, or strengths and weaknesses, or good outcomes and bad. Without a road to watch her eyes were involved too, narrowing, squinting, widening, shifting focus far and near.

Reacher was trying not to think. He was chasing an elusive memory, right in the twilight between conscious and subconscious. He was looking away from it, not thinking about it, leaving it well alone.

He said, “The library will be closed when we get there.”

She said, “We’ll hit it first thing in the morning. We’ll stay the night in a hotel.”

“We should make it a good one. We should stay in the best hotel in town, and send the bill to the newspaper. A big suite. With room service. They’ll be happy to pay. Because something is coming. I can feel it.”

“What exactly?”

“I don’t know. There’s something I can’t remember, but I know it’s important.”

“How, if you can’t remember?”

“Just a feeling.”

“Because the best hotel in town will go on my credit card first. I’ll be taking a financial risk.”

“They’ll be happy to pay,” Reacher said again.

“Four Seasons or the Peninsula?”

“Either one.”

“I’ll call from O’Hare and take whichever is cheaper.”

Reacher said nothing.

Chang said, “Exactly how important do you think this thing is, that you can’t remember but know is important?”

“I think it’s going to give us a shape. Of what we’re up against.”

“What is?”

“I don’t know. It’s like I’m trying to match two things. Two things have been identical. But I don’t know what. Words, or facts, or places.”

“Not places. LA is nothing like Mother’s Rest. There’s no similarity at all.”

“OK.”

“Neither is Chicago. Except maybe some of the farmers go there, to do whatever farmers do in Chicago. Is that it?”

“No.”

“You better hurry up. We’re going to be there soon.”