“Could be confidence. Like you said. Could be pure routine. Maybe his security is inside. Maybe they’re used to him ducking outside for a smoke. It’s early, and they know no one’s around. Maybe he doesn’t like them close. Or maybe he thinks staff relations are best done in private.”

“How long will he stay there?”

“It’s a big cigar. But maybe he smokes it a bit at a time.”

“We’ll never have a better chance.”

“And it can’t last much longer.”

“But we have to know.”

Reacher said nothing.

The fat man kept on talking. Maybe getting more intense. He was jabbing his head with every beat. The fat on his neck was jiggling. The rest of his body was implacably still. Not made for gesture.

Reacher said, “I think he’s summing up. I think he’s arriving at a conclusion. We don’t have much more time. We need a decision.”

Chang said nothing.

Then she said, “Wait.”

She raised her phone and Reacher saw a picture swim on the screen. The sidewalk, the pink fence, the open gap. An odd angle, unsteady. Camera mode. Then the trash containers, the fake garden, and the fat man.

She touched the screen and the phone made a sound like a shutter. Then she swiped and dabbed and typed and dabbed again, and the phone made a sound like a whoosh.

She said, “I’m asking my contact for visual ID.”

Reacher said, “She better hurry. This can’t last much longer.”

The fat man kept on talking, and jabbing, and jiggling. The guy in the do-rag kept on taking it. Then the fat man’s fingers started scrabbling at the top slat of the bench. Possibly the beginning of a long and complicated procedure designed to get himself up.

Reacher said, “We’re losing him.”

The fat man threw his cigar on the ground.

Chang’s phone dinged.

She checked the screen.

She said, “Oh, come on.”

“What?”

“She wants me to zoom in. She wants a close-up.”

“What is this, the Supreme Court?”

She raised her phone again and did something with her fingers, like the opposite of a pinch, and she got the fat man as big as she could, and steadied him in the center of the frame, and clicked the picture. Reacher turned around to get the Ruger off the floor in back. Just in case. He heard the whoosh of her text, or her e-mail, or whatever it was. He kept the gun low and smuggled it between the seats to his lap. A solid weapon. Nothing fancy. The firearm equivalent of a domestic sedan. Like the rental Chevrolet they were sitting in. The suppressor was an aftermarket item, with a custom mount. The magazine was two rounds short. From the old guy in the booth. The chest and the head. I hope you folks have a wonderful afternoon.

Reacher waited.

Then the fat man levered his hips forward. A special technique, clearly. He was going to jack himself straight, like a plank, and then walk himself upright with his hands. Or push off from behind, and hope to totter away. Neither maneuver easy. But one or the other obviously possible. The guy hadn’t spent his whole life in the same spot.

Reacher said, “We’re out of time.”

But then the Hispanic guy spoke.

Maybe a heartfelt statement, full of apology and contrition, full of promises of future reform, and likely polite, and certainly short, but apparently there was something in it the fat man wanted to either rebut or comment on further, because he settled back down, amid much asynchronous wobbling and shaking, and he started talking again.

Chang’s phone dinged.

She checked the screen.

She said, “We’re a hundred percent sure that’s Merchenko.”

Chapter 43

She drove twenty yards down the street, and then she U-turned, sidewalk to sidewalk, and came back slow, easing to a stop on the curb just shy of the first possible line of sight out the open half of the gate. Which put Reacher about sixty feet from the target. Twenty to the gate, and forty in the yard. A right-hand turn. He opened his door, and climbed out. There was no easy way to hide a silenced pistol, so he carried it down by his leg, long and threatening, mid-thigh to mid-calf. Completely unambiguous. But the acoustic benefits would be worth it, he hoped, during business hours, close to the center of America’s sixth-largest city.

Six paces on the sidewalk, and then he turned in at the yard. No guards behind the gate. The trash containers dead ahead. Then the garden. Then the fat man. Still talking. Not looking. Not yet. The Hispanic guy still standing, chin up, eyes level, still taking it. Reacher kept walking, brisk but not urgent, the gun still down, his heels loud on the concrete, so loud it was impossible the fat man wasn’t already staring at him, but he wasn’t. He was still talking, audible now, the same flat tones from the telephone, scolding, belittling, humiliating, his head jerking above the vast wattle of his neck.

Then he was staring. He turned his head, completely independent of his immobile body, and his mouth came open, and Reacher stepped over the token foot-high picket fence, to the shiny grass, and he raised the gun, and he took one step more.