So, no opportunity with the bathroom breaks. His lunch break would be the next chance. No way the guy is going twelve hours without eating. Cops are always eating. That’s your experience. Doughnuts, pastries, coffee, steak and eggs. Always eating.

HARPER WANTED A view of the city. She was like a tourist. Reacher walked her south through Washington Square Park and all the way down West Broadway to the World Trade Center. It was about a mile and three quarters. They sauntered slowly and spent fifty minutes doing it. The sky was bright and cold and the city was teeming. Harper was enjoying it.

“We could go up to the restaurant,” Reacher said. “Bureau could buy me lunch.”

“I just bought you lunch,” Harper said.

“No, that was a late breakfast.”

“You’re always eating,” she said.

“I’m a big guy,” he said. “I need nutrition.”

They checked their coats in the lobby and rode up to the top of the building. Waited in line at the restaurant desk, with Harper pressed up against the wall of windows, gazing out at the view. She showed her badge and they got a table for two, right at a window facing directly back up West Broadway and Fifth Avenue beyond, from a quarter-mile high.

"Awesome,” she said.

It was awesome. The air was crisp and clear and the view extended a hundred miles. The city was khaki far below them in the fall light. Packed, intricate, infinitely busy. The rivers were green and gray. The outer boroughs faded into Westchester and Connecticut and Long Island. In the other direction, New Jersey crowded the bank and curved away in the far distance.

“Bob’s over there,” she said.

“Someplace,” Reacher agreed.

“Who is Bob?”

“He’s an asshole.”

She smiled. “Not a very exact description, criminologically speaking.”

“He’s a storeman,” Reacher said. “A nine-to-five guy, if he’s in the bar every night.”

“He’s not our guy, right?”

He’s nobody’s guy, Reacher thought.

“He’s small-time,” he said. “Selling out of the trunk of his car in the parking lot? No ambition. Not enough at stake to make it worth killing people.”

“So how can he help us?”

“He can name names. He’s got suppliers, and he knows who the other players are. One of the other players will name more names, and then another and another. ”

“They all know each other?”

Reacher nodded. “They carve it up. They have specialties and territories, same as anybody else.”

“Could take us a long time.”

“I like the geography here,” Reacher said.

“The geography? Why?”

“It makes sense. You’re in the Army, you want to steal weapons, where do you steal them from? You don’t creep around the barracks at night and pull them out from every footlocker you see. That way, you get yourself about eight hours’ grace until the guys wake up and say hey, where’s my damn Beretta?”

“So where do you steal them from?”

“Someplace they won’t be missed, which means storage. Find a stockpile facility where they’re laid up ready for the next war.”

“And where are those?”

“Look at an interstate map.”

“Why interstate?”

“Why do you think the interstates were built? Not so the Harper family could drive from Aspen to Yellowstone Park on vacation. So the Army could move troops and weapons around, fast and easy.”

“They were?”

Reacher nodded. “Sure they were. Eisenhower built them in the fifties, height of the Cold War thing, and Eisenhower was a West Pointer, first and last.”

“So?”

“So you look where the interstates all meet. That’s where they put the storage, so the stuff can go any which way, moment’s notice. Mostly just behind the coasts, because old Ike wasn’t too worried about parachutists dropping into Kansas. He was thinking of ships coming in from the sea.”

“And Jersey is good for that?”

Reacher nodded again. “Great strategic location. Therefore lots of storage, therefore lots of theft.”

“Therefore Bob might know something?”

“He’ll point us in a new direction. That’s about all we can count on from Bob.”

HIS LUNCH BREAK is no good. No good at all. You keep the field glasses tight to your eyes and watch the whole thing happen. A second black-and-white prowl car noses around the corner and moves slowly up the hill. It stops flank to flank against the first one and stays there, motor running. Two of the damn things, side by side. Probably the whole of the police department’s fleet, right there in front of you.

You get a partial view. The driver’s window is down on both cars. There’s a brown paper sack and a closed cup of coffee. The new guy lifts them across the gap, elbow high to keep them upright. You adjust the focus on the field glasses. You see the waiting cop reach out. The scene is flat and two-dimensional and grainy, like the optics are at their limit. The cop takes the coffee first. His head turns as he finds the cup holder inside. Then he takes the bag. He props it on the ledge of his door and unrolls the top. Glances down. Smiles. He has a big, meaty face. He’s looking at a cheeseburger or something. Maybe two of them, and a wedge of pie.

He rolls the top of the sack again and swings it inside. Almost certainly dumps it on his passenger seat. Then his head is moving. They’re chatting. The cop is animated. He’s a young guy. The flesh of his face is tight with youth. He’s full of himself. Enchanted with his important mission. You watch him for a long moment. Watch the happy expression on his face. Wonder what that face will look like when he walks to her door for a bathroom break and gets no reply to his knock. Because right there and then you decide two things. You’re going in there, to do the job. And you’re going to work it without killing the cop first, just because you want to see that expression change.

THE NISSAN MAXIMA was briefly a drug dealers’ favorite ride, so Reacher felt OK about using it to get out to the Jersey bar. It would look innocent enough parked in the lot. It would look real. Unmarked government cars never did. A normal person spends twenty grand on a sedan, he goes ahead and orders the chrome wheels and the pearl coat along with it. But the government never did, so their cars looked obvious, artificially plain, like they had big signs painted on the side saying this is a police unmarked. And if Bob saw such a thing in the lot, he’d break the habit of a lifetime and spend his evening someplace else.

Reacher drove. Harper preferred not to, not in the dark and the rush hour. And rush hour was bad. Traffic was slow up the spine of Manhattan and jammed at the entrance to the tunnel. Reacher played with the radio and found a station where a woman was telling him how long he was going to have to wait. Forty, forty-five minutes. That was about twice as slow as walking, which was exactly how it felt.

They inched forward, deep under the Hudson River. His backyard was sixty miles upstream. He sat there and traced its contours in his mind, testing his decision. It was a nice enough yard, as yards go. Certainly it was fertile. You turned your head, the grass was a foot high when you turned it back. It had a lot of trees. Maples, which had been cute in the early fall. Cedars, which Leon must have planted himself, because they were placed in artful groups. Leaves came off the maples and little purple berries came off the cedars. When the leaves were down, there was a wide view of the opposite bank of the river. West Point was right there, and West Point had been an important part of Reacher’s life.

But he was not a nostalgic guy. Part of being a drifter means you look forward, not backward. You concentrate on what’s ahead. And he felt in his gut that a big part of looking ahead was looking for newness. Looking for places you hadn’t been and things you hadn’t seen. And the irony of his life was that although he had covered most of the earth’s surface, one time or another, he felt he hadn’t seen much. A lifetime in the service was like rushing down a narrow corridor, eyes fixed firmly to the front. There was all kinds of enticing stuff off to the sides, which you rushed past and ignored. Now he wanted to take the side trips. He wanted a crazy zigzag, any direction he felt like, any old time he wanted.