"Are you armed here?" Reacher asked.
"This is a farm," Jackson answered. "Farmers are always prepared for vermin control."
Something in his voice. Some kind of lethal determination. Reacher looked between him and Taylor. Same kind of height, same kind of weight, same kind of generic English features. Overall they could have been brothers. Sometimes a little resemblance is all you need. He got up out of his chair and walked over and took a look at the phone on the pine desk. It was an old-fashioned black instrument. It had a cord and a rotary dial. No memories. No speed dials.
He turned back to Taylor.
"You wanted this," he said.
"Did I?"
"You used the name Leroy Clarkson. To point the way to your apartment."
Taylor said nothing.
"You could have stopped Jade from bringing her toys. You could have told Kate to leave the photograph behind. Your sister Susan could have brought Tony's passport over for you. She could have carried it in her purse. Then there would have been three Jacksons on the airplane manifest, not two Jacksons and a Taylor. Without your real name you couldn't have been followed back to England."
Taylor said nothing.
"The phone in your apartment was new," Reacher said. "You didn't have it before, did you? You bought it so that you could leave Susan's number in it."
"Why would I do that?" Taylor asked.
"Because you wanted Lane to find you here."
Taylor said nothing.
"You talked to Dave Kemp in the village store," Reacher said. "You gave him all kinds of unnecessary details. And he's the biggest gossip in the county. Then you went and hung out in the pub with a bunch of nosy farmers. I'm sure you would have rather stayed home, under the circumstances. With your new family. But you couldn't do that. Because you wanted to lay a clear trail. Because you knew Lane would hire someone like me. And you wanted to help someone like me find you. Because you wanted to bring Lane here for a showdown."
Silence in the room.
Reacher said, "You wanted to be on your home turf. And you figured this is an easy place to defend."
More silence. Reacher glanced at Kate.
"You were upset," he said. "Not that Lane was coming, but that he was coming now. Already. Too soon."
Kate said nothing. But Taylor nodded. "Like I said before, he was a little faster than we expected. But yes, we wanted him to come."
"Why?"
"You just said it. We wanted a showdown. Closure. Finality."
"Why now?"
"I told you."
"Reparations for the wounded aren't urgent. Not like this."
Kate Lane looked up from her chair by the fire.
"I'm pregnant," she said.
Chapter 68
IN THE SOFT light of the flames from the hearth, Kate's simple and vulnerable beauty was emphasized to the point of heartbreak. She said, "When Edward and I first started fighting he accused me of being unfaithful. Which wasn't actually true back then. But he was in a rage. He said if he ever caught me sleeping around he would show me how much it hurt him by doing something to Jade that would hurt me even more. He went into the kind of detail I can't repeat now. Not in front of her. But it was very frightening. It was so frightening that I persuaded myself not to take it seriously. But after hearing about Anne and Knight and Hobart I knew I had to take it seriously. By which time I really did have something to hide. So we ran. And here we are."
"With Lane right behind you."
"He deserves whatever he gets, Mr. Reacher. He's truly a monster."
Reacher turned to Jackson. "You're not fixing the backhoe to dredge ditches, are you? It's not raining and the ditches look fine anyway. And you wouldn't take time out to do something like that. Not right now. Not under these circumstances. You're fixing the backhoe to dig graves, aren't you?"
"At least one grave," Taylor said. "Maybe two or three, until the whole crew goes home and leaves us alone. You got a problem with that?"
We'll find Taylor, Reacher had said, on the plane. Lane will take care of him, and then I'll take care of Lane. Pauling had asked him, What about the others? Reacher had said: If I think the crew will fall apart with Lane gone, then I'll leave the others alone and let it. But if one of them wants to step up and take over, I'll do him, too. And so on and so forth, until the crew really does fall apart.
Pauling had said: Brutal.
Reacher had asked: Compared to what?
He looked straight at Taylor.
"No," he answered. "I guess I don't have a problem with that. Not really. No problem at all, in fact. I'm just not used to finding people on the same wavelength as me."
"You keeping your million bucks?"
Reacher shook his head. "I was going to give it to Hobart."
"That's good," Kate said. "That frees up some of our money for the others."
Taylor said, "Ms. Pauling? What about you? Do you have a problem?"
Pauling said, "I ought to. I ought to have a huge problem. Once upon a time I swore an oath to uphold the law."
"But?"
"I can't get to Lane any other way. So no, I don't have a problem."
"So we're in business," Taylor said. "Welcome to the party."
After they finished their tea Jackson took Reacher into a small mud room off the back of the kitchen and opened a double-door wall cupboard above a washing machine. In it were racked four Heckler amp; Koch G-36 automatic rifles. The G-36 was a very modern design that had showed up in service just before Reacher's military career had ended. Therefore he wasn't very familiar with it. It had a nineteen-inch barrel and an open folding stock and was basically fairly conventional apart from a huge superstructure that carried a bulky optical sight integrated into an oversized carrying handle. It was chambered for the standard 5.56mm NATO round and like most German weapons it looked very expensive and beautifully engineered.
Reacher asked, "Where did you get these from?"
"I bought them," Jackson said. "From a bent quartermaster in Holland. Susan went over there and picked them up."
"For this thing with Lane?"
Jackson nodded. "It's been a heavy few weeks. Lots of planning."
"Are they traceable?"
"The Dutch guy's paperwork shows they were destroyed in a training accident."
"Got ammunition?"
Jackson moved across the room and opened another cupboard, lower down. Behind a row of muddy Wellington boots Reacher could see the glint of black metal. A lot of it.
"Seventy magazines," Jackson said. "Two thousand one hundred rounds."
"That should do the trick."
"We can't use it. Not more than three or four rounds. Too noisy."
"How close are the cops?"
"Not very. Norwich, I suppose, unless there happens to be a patrol car out. But people here have phones. Some of them even know how to use them."
"You can turn the bird scarer off for a day."
"Obviously. But I shouldn't really be using that, either. An organic farm doesn't need a bird scarer. No pesticides means plenty of insects for the birds to eat. They don't go after the seed. Sooner or later people are going to realize that."
"So the bird scarer is new, too?"
Jackson nodded. "Part of the planning. Set to start firing at dawn. That's when we expect Lane to come."
"If I had a sister and a brother-in-law I'd want them to be like you and Susan."