The clerk at the reception desk beckoned them closer. She was a young woman in a fitted jacket, with a scarf around her neck. There was some kind of secret urgency in her gesture. She said, “Sir, madam, I have one room left. If you need it, you should probably grab it now.”

Chang said, “Only one room?”

“Yes, ma’am, because the airlines had a problem today.”

“Is there another hotel?”

“Not in the airport.”

Reacher said, “We’ll take the room.”

Chang looked at him, and he said, “We’ll figure it out.”

He paid, and got a key card in exchange. Fifth floor, room 501, elevators to the left, room service until eleven, breakfast extra, free wifi. Behind them two couples had lined up, about to be disappointed. Reacher and Chang rode up to five and found the room. It was beige and mint green inside, and adequate in every respect. But Chang was quiet about it. Reacher said, “You can use it.”

She said, “What will you do?”

“I’m sure I’ll think of something.” He carried her bag inside, and left it by the bed. He gave her the key card, and said, “We should go get dinner. Before the waifs and strays take all the tables.”

“Let me freshen up. I’ll meet you in the restaurant.”

“OK.”

“Do you need to freshen up? You could use the bathroom first, if you like.”

Reacher glanced in the mirror. Recent haircut, recent shave, recent shower, new clothes. He said, “This is about as good as it gets, I’m afraid.”

The restaurant was on the ground floor, separated from the reception area by the elevator lobby. It was a pleasant space, with drapes and carpet and blond wood, compromised only a little by stain-proof and scuff-proof and vinyl-coated finishes on every surface. It was capacious, but almost full. Reacher waited at the hostess lectern, and was led to a table for two near a window. There was no real view. Just yellow lights, and a parking lot full of snowplows, mothballed for the summer.

Chang arrived eight minutes later, face washed, hair brushed, wearing a new T-shirt. She sat down opposite Reacher, looking good, energetic again, clearly invigorated by the simple comfort of running water. But then her face changed, as if suddenly she saw the other side of the equation, which was whatever she had, he didn’t.

He said, “Don’t worry about it.”

She said, “Where will you sleep?”

“I could sleep right here.”

“In a dining chair?”

“I was in the army thirteen years. You learn to sleep pretty much anywhere.”

She paused a beat, and said, “What was the army like?”

“Pretty good, overall. I have happy memories and no real complaints. Apart from the obvious.”

“Which was?”

“The same as yours, I’m sure. The fantastic cascade of bullshit coming down from senior officers with nothing better to do.”

She smiled. “There was some of that.”

“Is that why you left?”

She stopped smiling.

She said, “No, not exactly.”

He said, “I’ll tell you if you tell me.”

“I don’t know if I want to.”

“What’s the worst thing can happen?”

She paused a beat, and breathed in, and breathed out, and said, “You first.”

“They were shedding numbers, and therefore picking and choosing. My record was mixed, and right then some particular guy had it in for me. Given those two circumstances, it wasn’t exactly a huge surprise my file ended up in the out tray.”

“What particular guy?”

“He was a light colonel. A fat guy, with a desk job. Public relations, in Mississippi. I was there, with a bad thing going on, and he got all uptight about something ridiculous, and I was mildly impatient with him, verbally, to his face, and he took offense. And got his revenge, simply because the timing worked in his favor. I had gotten away with much worse before, when they weren’t shedding numbers.”

“Couldn’t you fight it?”

“I could have called in some IOUs. But the damage was done. It was a zero-sum game. If I won, the colonel would lose, and all the other colonels wouldn’t like that. None of them would want me near them. I would have ended up guarding a radar hut in the far north of Alaska. In the middle of winter. It was a lose-lose proposition. Plus it burst the bubble for me. They really didn’t want me there. I finally realized. So I didn’t fight it. I took an honorable discharge and walked away.”

“When was this?”

“A long time ago.”

“And you’re still walking.”

“That’s too profound.”

“You sure?”

“Deep down I’m very shallow.”

She didn’t answer. A waitress came by, and they ordered. When she left, Reacher said, “Your turn.”

“For what?” Chang said.

“Your story.”

She paused another beat.

“Same as yours, in a way,” she said. “A lose-lose proposition. But of my own making. I let myself get backed into a corner. I didn’t see it coming.”

“Didn’t see what?”

“Someone broke into my house. They took nothing, searched nothing, broke nothing, and left nothing. Which I didn’t understand at the time. I was working on a money-laundering issue. There was a lot of cash and a mazy chain of shell corporations, like always, but I had the guy. But it was a hard case to prove. Almost impossible, in fact. I was leaning toward forgetting it. There’s no point in recommending a prosecution if there’s no realistic way of winning it. And then the guy came to see me. I was literally on the point of telling him the file was about to be closed. But he spoke first, and he was two steps behind. He told me if I didn’t drop it right away he would claim I had taken a bribe, back at the beginning, to look the other way, but then later on I had changed my mind and stabbed him in the back. And kept the money anyway. He figured my work would be tainted, or even excluded, and he would walk.”

“People can say all kinds of things. How could he prove it?”

“He had set up a bank account for me in the Caribbean, in my name, and he wired the bribe money to it. It was right there, large as life. Real money, and a lot of it. It would corroborate everything he was claiming.”

“Except he opened the account, not you. There must be records.”

“He told me it was a woman who broke into my house. She took nothing, searched nothing, broke nothing and left nothing. But she used my land line. She opened the account for me, right there in my house, and it’s all over my phone bill. Which left me between a rock and a hard place. How could I prove I didn’t make that call? I figured maybe the foreign bank would have a recording, or the NSA, but two women’s voices might be hard to tell apart on a long-distance line, especially if she was trying to sound like me, which she probably was, because this was a very organized guy. He knew my Social Security Number, for instance, and my mother’s maiden name. That’s my security question, apparently.”

“So what did you do?”

“What he told me to. I dropped the case. Right away. I closed his file. But I was going to anyway. I think.”

“Where is the guy now?”

“Still in business.”

“What happened to the bribe money?”

“It disappeared. I traced it, like he knew I would. I found it in a shell corporation in the Dutch Antilles. Apparently I had purchased a minority position in a financial vehicle, as a long-term investment. He was the majority stockholder. We were tied together forever.”

“So what next?”

“I fessed up. I laid it all out for my SAC. I could see he wanted to believe me, but the Bureau doesn’t run on faith. And from that point on I would have been useless as an active agent. My testimony would have been automatically suspect, even years later. I would have been a defense counsel’s wet dream. As in, Special Agent, please tell us about the bribe you can’t prove you didn’t take. So I would have joined you in that radar hut in Alaska. In the middle of winter. It was a lose-lose. So I resigned.”