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Then the left.

Both blades were short and narrow and thin. Some kind of fancy blued steel. Maybe German, maybe Japanese. No doubt souvenirs from some lucrative OCONUS contract. Outside the continental United States. There was money to be earned all over the world. Dirty money, for dirty work. Plus souvenirs.

The guy inched forward. He was holding the blades out in front of him, at a height an inch above Reacher’s waist. He was moving them slowly side to side, hypnotic, like a cobra swaying in a basket. His body position was good. Nimble, ready, up on his toes, turned side-on to protect his groin. His gaze was fixed on Reacher’s hands. Smart guy. Reacher was eight inches taller and had arms like a gorilla. An unfair advantage of his own. More than a knife’s length longer than the pale guy’s. Reacher’s blow would land first. So evidently the plan was to take it if necessary, but to slash diagonally upward as it came in, hoping to catch a bunch of veins and arteries on the inside of Reacher’s arm. He wanted to start the bleeding. Death by a thousand cuts.

Reacher waited.

His unfair advantage was not his arms. His legs were even longer. He liked a forty-inch inseam when he could get it. Thirty-eight inches worked, but anything shorter made him look ten again, outgrowing clothes faster than his mother could sew them. Plus he liked good shoes. He liked commando soles, a heavy welt, leather liners, leather uppers, and tightly tied laces. What the army would call man-portable offensive weapons. Like sledgehammers you wear on your feet.

Reacher brought his hands up, slow, wary, chest height, open but ready, as if his plan was to grab the guy’s wrists and force them apart and land a head butt. The guy followed the moves all the way. His gaze came up. The blades came up. Reacher waited. The guy changed the hypnotic side to side sway of the blades to in and out, alternately left and right, rhythmically, an inch, then two, then three.

Reacher leaned back and kicked the guy in the knee. Just a lightning snap of the foot, going for precision not power, aiming for where the kneecap was tied to the shin bone by a long thick ligament. He got the precision, and happily he got enough power that the welt on his shoe popped the guy’s kneecap out from where it was nestled in a hollow at the bottom of his thigh bone. It came loose and slid sideways under the skin. What a medic would call a patellar dislocation. Immediate intense pain, rapid swelling, structural instability. Typically six to eight weeks’ recovery time.

Which the guy didn’t have. He didn’t have six to eight seconds. He had one at most. He fought to stay on his feet. He knew that to fall down was to end up dead. He hopped on his good leg and braced against the bad leg and kept his knives up and ready. Still in the game. But not smiling anymore. That was for damn sure.

Reacher took a long step back and waited out of range. The pale guy tried to follow him. First he had to work out how. Either he had to put all his weight on his bad knee, or he had to hop on his good leg. In the end he went for a mixture of both. He half shuffled, half staggered forward, impaired but functioning, not about to quit. But he should have. From then on it was purely a game of chess. Inevitable. Checkmate in three. Guaranteed.

Reacher shuffled to his left, not far, more a suggestion than a step, and he saw the pale guy gear up to follow, whereupon he reversed direction and dodged back to his right, fast and sudden, going counterclockwise around the guy, whose own shaky momentum was already turning him clockwise, thereby accelerating their relative displacement, which meant that two short steps later Reacher was standing right behind him, with a whole smorgasbord of options at his disposal. He could kick the guy behind his good knee, which would dump him on the floor, but he would still have the knives waving all around, so maybe a rabbit punch might be better. Why not? It had worked before.

But evidently the guy was aware of all those options. He knew he had to go proactive. He was right handed, so he twisted at the waist and threw his right arm back, bent at the elbow, aiming to slash and stab blindly at the air behind him. But the twist of his waist and the weight of his fast-moving arm produced an instinctive reset of his feet, which any other time would have been an automatic reflex, not even noticed, but which that time collapsed his damaged knee and clattered him to the floor. He dropped one knife and was too dazed by the pain to do anything much with the other. Reacher kicked him hard in the side of the head. Lights out. Game over.

Reacher unzipped the guy’s jacket and found a Beretta in a shoulder holster. Standard army issue. Officially the Pistol, Semiautomatic, Nine-millimeter, M9. In the pants pockets were a roll of cash and a phone. Reacher had the SSSS pat-down and the X-ray machine in his future, so he took only the cash and the phone. He hauled the guy into the end stall and propped him on the toilet. He was still breathing, but not about to wake up anytime soon. Reacher broke the fingers on his right hand. And then his left too, just in case the guy was ambidextrous. He had shown a certain facility with the knives. Not anymore. No more shooting, no more driving. No more use at all. Never leave a serviceable weapon on the battlefield.

He kicked the knives into the stall and closed the door. He stretched his arm over the top and locked it from the inside. Good enough for an hour or two. He wanted to be safely on the plane before any kind of mayhem broke out in the terminal.

Chapter 33

Turner and Elwood were waiting for him at the gate. They were sitting side by side in a long row of chairs. The place was crowded. Some folks were sitting on the floor. Some were already lining up to board.

Turner said, “You have blood on your shoe.”

Reacher checked. Not much. Not more than a tablespoon.

He said, “How many men are there in Axel Brill’s private army?”

She paused a beat.

“One less?” she said.

“They can see your diary. They knew we would be leaving right away. They came here to get us.”

“How many?”

“I’m guessing three. The day crew. The same guys I saw at the coffee shop. I’m guessing one of them stayed with their car, because parking here is nuts. So only two of them came inside.”

“What happened?”

“I used a bathroom. One of them stuck his head in the door. I didn’t see the other one. I looked afterward, but I couldn’t find him.”

“What did you do to the one in the bathroom?”

“He’ll live, but he’s off the playing field for a good long spell. Some bone doctor’s kid won’t need student loans. That’s for damn sure. I hope EEF has workers’ comp.”

“What was he like?”

“Not the worst I ever saw. He had an M9 and two switchblades. His search pattern was diligent. That bathroom was well out the way. He gave a good account of himself overall. He was a hard man. He stayed vertical longer than most.”

“That sounds promising. Only another five just like him.”