He stared at the laptops and the comb-bound folders and winced inside. How was he going to cross the border of the distant country without getting issued with all this stuff? The suits and the ties and the black plastic battery-driven devices? The lizard-skin cases and the memorandums from the main office? He shuddered and found himself paralyzed against the bulkhead, panicking, not breathing, completely unable to move. He recalled a day not more than a year ago, stepping out of a truck at a crossroads near a town he had never heard of in a state he had never been. He had waved the driver away and thrust his hands deep in his pockets and started walking, with a million miles behind him and a million miles ahead of him. The sun was shining and the dust was kicking up off his feet as he walked and he had smiled with the joy of being alone with absolutely no idea where he was headed.

But he also recalled a day nine months after that. Realizing he was running out of money, thinking hard. The cheapest motels still required some small amount of dollars. The cheapest diners, likewise. He had taken the job in the Keys, intending to work a couple of weeks. Then he had taken the evening job, too, and he was still working both of them when Costello came calling three whole months later. So the reality was that drifting was already over. He was already a working man. No point in denying it. Now it was just a question of where and how much and for who. He smiled. Like prostitution, he thought. No going back. He relaxed a little and pushed off the bulkhead and padded back through to first class.

The guy with the striped shirt and the arms the same length as Victor Hobie’s was awake and watching him. He nodded a greeting. Reacher nodded back and headed for the bathroom. Jodie was awake when he got back to his seat. She was sitting up straight, combing her hair with her fingers.

“Hi, Reacher,” she said.

“Hey, Jodie,” he said back.

He bent and kissed her on the lips. Stepped over her feet and sat down.

“Feel OK?” he asked.

She ducked her head in a figure eight to put her hair behind her shoulders.

“Not bad. Not bad at all. Better than I thought I would. Where did you go?”

“I took a walk,” he said. “I went back to see how the other half lives.”

“No, you were thinking. I noticed that about you fifteen years ago. You always go walking when you have something to think about.”

“I do?” he said, surprised. “I didn’t know that.”

“Of course you do,” she said. “I noticed it. I used to watch every detail about you. I was in love with you, remember?”

“What else do I do?”

“You clench your left hand when you’re angry or tense. You keep your right hand loose, probably from weapons training. When you’re bored, you play music in your head. I could see it in your fingers, like you’re playing along on a piano or something. The tip of your nose moves a little bit when you talk.”

“It does?”

“Sure it does,” she said. “What were you thinking about?”

He shrugged.

“This and that,” he said.

“The house, right?” she said. “It’s bothering you, isn’t it? And me. Me and the house, tying you down, like that guy in the book, Gulliver? You know that book?”

He smiled. “He’s a guy gets captured by tiny little people when he’s asleep. They peg him down flat with hundreds of tiny little ropes.”

“You feel that way?”

He paused a beat. “Not about you.”

But the pause had been a fraction of a second too long. She nodded.

“It’s different than being alone, right?” she said. “I know, I was married. Somebody else to take into account all the time? Somebody to worry about?”

He smiled. “I’ll get used to it.”

She smiled back. “And there’s the house, right?”

He shrugged. “Feels weird.”

“Well, that’s between you and Leon,” she said. “I want you to know I’m not putting demands on you, either way. About anything. It’s your life, and your house. You should do exactly what you want, no pressure.”

He nodded. Said nothing.

“So you going to look for Hobie?”

He shrugged again. “Maybe. But it’s a hell of a task.”

“Bound to be angles,” she said. “Medical records and things? He must have a prosthesis. And if he’s burned, too, there’ll be records of that. And you wouldn’t miss him in the street, would you? A one-armed man, all burned up?”

He nodded. “Or I could just wait for him to find me. I could just hang out in Garrison until he sends his boys back.”

Then he turned to the window and stared out at his pale reflection against the darkness and realized I’m just accepting he’s alive. I’m just accepting I was wrong. He turned back to Jodie.

“Will you give me the mobile? Can you manage without it today? In case Nash finds something and calls me? I want to hear right away, if he does.”

She held his gaze for a long moment, and then she nodded. Leaned down and unzipped her carry-on. Took out the phone and handed it to him.

“Good luck,” she said.

He nodded and put the phone in his pocket.

“I never used to need luck,” he said.

NASH NEWMAN DID not wait until nine o’clock in the morning to start the search. He was a meticulous man, attentive to tiny detail as much in his ethics as in his professional speciality. This was an unofficial search, undertaken out of compassion for a troubled friend, so it couldn’t be done on company time. A private matter had to be settled privately.

So he got out of bed at six, watching the faint red glow of tropical dawn starting beyond the mountains. He made coffee and dressed. By six-thirty he was in his office. He figured he would give it two hours. Then he would have breakfast in the mess and start his proper work on time at nine.

He rolled open a desk drawer and lifted out Victor Hobie’s medical records. Leon Garber had assembled them after patient inquiries in doctors’ and dentists’ offices in Putnam County. He had bundled them into an old military police folder and secured it shut with an old canvas strap. The strap had been red, but age had faded it to dusty pink. There was a fiddly metal buckle.

He undid the buckle. Opened the folder. The top sheet was a release signed by both the Hobie parents in April. Underneath it was ancient history. He had scanned thousands of files similar to this one, and he could effortlessly place the boys they referred to in terms of their age, their geographic location, their parents’ income, their ability at sports, all the numerous factors that affect a medical history. Age and location worked together. A new dental treatment might start out in California and sweep the country like a fashion, so the thirteen-year-old boy getting it in Des Moines had to have been born five years later than the thirteen-year-old boy getting it in Los Angleles. Their parents’ income dictated whether they got it at all. The high school football stars had treatment for torn shoulders, the softball players had cracked wrists, the swimmers had chronic ear infections.

Victor Truman Hobie had very little at all. Newman read between the lines and pictured a healthy boy, properly fed, conscientiously cared for by dutiful parents. His health had been good. There had been colds and flu, and a bout of bronchitis at the age of eight. No accidents. No broken bones. Dental treatment had been very thorough. The boy had grown up through the era of aggressive dentistry. In Newman’s experience, it was absolutely typical of any he had seen from the New York metropolitan area in the fifties and early sixties. Dentistry through that era consisted of a war on cavities. Cavities had to be hunted down. They were hunted with powerful X rays, and when they were found they were enlarged with the drill and filled with amalgam. The result was a lot of trips to the dentist’s office, which no doubt had been miserable for the young Victor Hobie, but from Newman’s point of view the process had left him with a thick sheaf of films of the boy’s mouth. They were good enough and clear enough and numerous enough to be potentially definitive.