Which was when he got it.

He said, “Not words or facts or places.”

She said, “What then?”

“Faces,” he said. “Do you remember that Town Car on the 405?”

“There were a million Town Cars on the 405.”

“One of them pulled alongside and kept pace for a second, and then got rear-ended by a red coupe.”

“Oh, that one.”

“Its window came down. I caught a glimpse of the guy inside.”

“How much of a glimpse?”

“Partial, and extremely brief.”

“But?”

“We’ve seen him before.”

“Where?”

“In the diner in Inglewood. That brown place. This morning. Where we met with Westwood the first time. That guy was in there. Elbows on the table, reading a newspaper.”

Now Chang said nothing.

“Same guy,” Reacher said.

“I was trained to think like a defense attorney.”

“And whatever you’re going to say, the front part of my brain agrees with you a hundred percent. It was a split-second glimpse between two vehicles moving at forty miles an hour, and eyewitness testimony is unreliable at best.”

“But?”

“The back part of my brain knows it was the same guy.”

“How?”

“The radio chatter is off the scale.”

“You hear radio chatter?”

“I listen out for it hard. We were wild animals for seven million years. We learned a lot of lessons. We should be careful not to lose them.”

“What is the radio chatter saying?”

“Part of it is tuning up for a fight. It knows nothing good is coming.”

“What about the other part?”

“It’s having a back-and-forth, working out the implications. Which are basically all or nothing. Either I’m completely mistaken, or that guy has been following us from the start. Which would mean he’s tracking us through your cell phone. Which would mean he knows virtually everything so far. And which would mean we better call the Four Seasons or the Peninsula from a pay phone. That way we’ll get ahead. And we need to get ahead, because this guy is escalating. He’s moving right along. At breakfast this morning in the diner he was observing. Maybe eavesdropping a little, reading lips. Now he’s trying to kill us.”

“By opening his window?”

“He looked at me. For a split second I thought he wanted to tell me something. He was kind of locking in on me. In a preparatory way. But not ahead of him telling me something. He was acquiring his target. That’s what he was doing. Logic says he had a sawed-off shotgun in there with him. For a car-to-car drive-by, like an air-to-air missile. Two rounds to make sure, and then everyone panics and crashes, and he gets away in the fast lane, and afterward he was just one Town Car in a million, like you said.”

“That’s a very extreme scenario.”

“It’s all or nothing. What else was he doing, pulling level like that? He’s been told to take us out. Which suggests he’s versatile. And therefore expensive. Which starts to give us a shape for what’s happening in Mother’s Rest. They’re supplying something. In exchange for money. Enough money to hire a versatile private operative to counter a perceived threat.”

“Unless like you said, it was a split-second glimpse at forty miles an hour, two moving vehicles, and eyewitness testimony is unreliable.”

“Hope for the best, plan for the worst.”

“That wouldn’t get us a warrant.”

“Warrants are about what you can prove. Not what you know.”

“And you know?”

“It’s an instinct thing. It’s why I’m still here, after seven million years. Darwinism in action.”

She said, “What did we do between breakfast time and now to make them escalate?”

“Exactly,” he said. “We homed in on McCann.”

“Who must therefore be very dangerous to them. And therefore very interesting to us.”

“And the library will be closed when we get there.”

She said, “If he’s the same guy. You could still be wrong.”

“But the smart money says we should act like I’m right. Just in case.”

“Like Pascal’s Wager.”

“Costs us nothing if we’re wrong, but saves us plenty if we’re right.”

“Except he’s behind us now. He’s still in LA.”

“Not necessarily. This was not the first flight out.”

Chang said nothing. She just took out her phone, and held down a button, and changed it from airplane mode to off completely.

They landed from the east, after a long lazy loop over the lake and the city. A summer dusk was almost done, still bronze and hot, but darkening. The lights on the runways were bright. They taxied and parked, and the seatbelt sign went off, and people stood up and wrestled things out of the overheads and from under the seats, and they started to pack together in the aisle, Reacher and Chang among them.

Chapter 32

Eventually Reacher and Chang crabbed one at a time down the aisle to the airplane door, and out to the jet bridge, and then out to the concourse, which was packed full of a thousand people either sitting and waiting or hustling fast in every direction. Reacher had the unknown man’s face front and center in his mind, like a Most Wanted photograph in the post office, and he scanned the crowds obliquely, in the corner of his eye, looking away, not thinking, trusting his instincts to snag the resemblance, if it was there.

It wasn’t. The guy wasn’t sitting, wasn’t waiting, wasn’t hustling in any direction. They walked together through the long concourse corridor, past people waiting outside restroom doors, past people lining up for coffee, past newsstands, past silvery boutiques, past fast-food eateries with their laminate tables and their hunched solo travelers. Reacher scanned ahead for newspapers being read, for elbows on the table, for a familiar slope of shoulders, but he saw nothing. No guy. Not in the building.

They made it to the airside exit, and stepped out to landside, to baggage claim, and onward toward the door for ground transportation, and they saw a wall of pay phones, lonely and ignored, but better still they found a concierge desk, which offered all kinds of helpful services to new arrivals, including hotel bookings made direct. A cheerful woman in a blazer recommended the Peninsula, and made the call for them, and got them a suite, and told them where the cab line was.

It was a warm evening, and the air outside was thick with humidity and gas fumes and cigarette smoke. They waited five minutes, and got a tired guy in a tired Crown Vic, who took off for town as fast as he could. Reacher watched out the window until the airport crowds were gone, but he saw no faces he knew. On the highway he watched the cars around them, but none pulled close or kept pace. They all just rolled along through the evening dark, individually, oblivious, all lit up, in worlds of their own.

Chang said, “We should buy a burner phone.”

Reacher said, “And we should tell Westwood to buy one too. Because that’s how our guy got this whole thing started, presumably. He was sitting on Westwood, monitoring his calls. We came to him, this morning. We walked right into it.”

“Which proves they’re worried about Westwood. Which confirms something Westwood wrote is highly relevant.”

“Probably not the sharks and the Frenchman.”

“Or the gerbils or the climate change.”

“See? We’re narrowing it down already.”

They came in parallel to the L tracks, and saw the great city huge and high and implacable in front of them, by that time a purely nighttime vista, with a million lit windows against an inky eastern sky. The Peninsula hotel was ready and waiting for them, with a suite twice as large as the service bungalows Reacher had grown up in, and a thousand times plusher. The room service menu was the size of a phone book, and bound in leather. They ordered whatever they wanted, on the assumption the LA Times would pay. They ate it slowly, on the assumption they had the whole night ahead, uninterrupted. No need to rush. Better to savor the certainty. Better to bask in the upcoming promise. Through appetizers, and entrees, and desserts, and coffee.