Page 1

Chapter 1

She knew that finding Reacher would not be easy. But not impossible either. She had met him some years previously. She had spent quality time with him, and she had learned some of his habits. He was a wanderer. His trail would be faint. He left no normal breadcrumbs. He had no online existence at all. No social media. No email address, no cell phone plan. No financial profile. Everything he wanted could be bought with cash. Some of it only with cash.

But where did the cash come from? That was the key. As far as she remembered him telling it, in the old days it was remote calls to his bank, from distant payphones, and then visits to the Western Union, wherever he happened to be. Now he carried an ATM card. The modern world. Photo ID, too. Probably he used the ATM card at least once a week. Bus tickets, diner checks, motel rooms, Goodwill stores for new old clothes.

Which meant his bank would always know where he was. Or at least where he had recently been. Like live tracking a man, a maximum six days behind real time.

She called his bank. The top of the C-suite. They took her call, of course, because of who she was, and where she was calling from. They authorized her request and handed her off to their data people. Who pieced together the last four weeks. His movements had been completely random. Here and there, no pattern, no rhyme or reason. No particular place to go, and all the time in the world to get there.

No way of guessing where next.

Dead end.

Then the data guy said, “Wait.”

She said, “What?”

“Is today your birthday?”

“No,” she said.

“I think it is. His ATM card expired two days ago. He needs a replacement.”

“Still not my birthday.”

“The question is how he gets it.”

She paused a beat.

“He wouldn’t want it in the mail,” she said. “He wouldn’t want to be trapped in one place day after day, waiting for it to arrive.”

“Exactly,” the data guy said. “The last time, he came in to pick it up in person.”

—

Two days later, Reacher got a ride down a long fast piece of I-95, and then he took a bus from a suburban town in Maryland, heading south into the D.C. metro area. His bank was in Arlington, in a strip mall, near the northwestern edge of the Pentagon’s giant parking lot. It had been the first bank he saw, all those years ago, the day he mustered out.

Where he got out of the bus gave him a mile walk. Fifteen minutes. The middle of August. Typical D.C. summer weather. Hot, humid, heavy air, no wind. No problem. He liked being warm. Better than being cold. He saw the bright white monuments far away across the river. He passed within three hundred yards of the Rock Creek building that had housed the 110th MP when he was leading it. He didn’t make the detour. Not his circus, not his monkeys. Not anymore. Maybe it wasn’t even there anymore. Maybe it had been bulldozed.

He walked on. Up ahead he saw the back of the strip mall, a low tan line in the distance. The bank was on the right. Bigger than the rest of the row. The anchor tenant. Beyond it in the haze was the Pentagon, low, wide, sometimes tan, sometimes gray. There were vehicles all around, seas of them parked, rivers of them driving.

There was a military police squad car parked behind the bank, gaudy with stripes, winking in the sun. Dodges now, Reacher had noticed. They had been Fords and Chevrolets in his day. Given its location, no doubt the bank would have its fair share of military customers, of which a percentage would be military police, but customers generally parked in the front, not in the back. So the car was there on business, which was plausible, because a lot of crime was financial, even in the army. Maybe especially in the army.

Except that the kind of high-level pointy-heads required for investigations into financial institutions generally used unmarked cars. A self-image issue, in Reacher’s opinion. Prestige. They wouldn’t drive a thing with stripes.

A puzzle.

But not his circus.

Except it turned out to be. He skirted around the landscaping so he could use the front door like a regular person, and he saw a pair of MP warrant officers standing by the entrance. They were wearing the ACU, which was the army combat uniform, which had been the BDU in Reacher’s day, battledress uniform, and better looking, in his opinion. Less like pajamas.

The two soldiers saw him coming. They stepped up a pace and closed ranks. One of them said, “Major Reacher?”

“Not anymore,” he said. “Now I’m just Reacher.”

“Sir, we have an invitation for you.”

“To what?”