You’re on your feet instantly. Car keys in your hand. You hustle straight across the court, ten feet, twenty, thirty. You’re swinging the keys. Looking busy. She’s in line. About to be served. You drop your keys and they skid across the tiles. You bend to retrieve them. Your hand skims her bag. You come back up with the keys and the phone together. You walk on. The keys go back in your pocket. The phone stays in your hand. Nothing more ordinary than somebody walking through an airport lounge holding a mobile.

You walk at normal pace. Stop and lean on a pillar. You flip the phone open and hold it at your face, pretending to make a call. Now you’re invisible. You’re a person leaning on a pillar making a call. There are a dozen of you within a twenty-foot radius. You look back. She’s back at her table, drinking her coffee. You wait, whispering nothing into the phone. She drinks. Three minutes. Four. Five. You press random buttons and start talking again. You’re on a new call. You’re busy. You’re one of the guys. She stands up. Yanks on the cords of her backpack to close it up. Picks it up by the cords and bounces it against its own weight to make them tight. She buckles the catches. Swings the pack onto one shoulder and picks up her pocketbook. Opens it to check her ticket is accessible. Closes it again. She looks around once and strides purposefully out of the food court. Straight toward you. She passes within five feet and disappears toward the departure gates. You flip the phone closed and slip it into the pocket of your suit and you walk out the other way. You smile to yourself as you go. Now the crucial call is going to end up on someone else’s bill.

THE PHONE CALL to the Fort Armstrong duty officer revealed nothing at all on the surface, but the guy’s evasions were voiced in such a way that a thirteen-year Army cop like Reacher took them to be confirmation as good as he’d get if they were written in an affidavit sworn before a notary public.

“He’s there,” he said.

Harper had been eavesdropping, and she didn’t look convinced.

“They tell you that for sure?” she asked.

“More or less,” he said.

“So is it worth going?”

He nodded. “He’s there, I guarantee it.”

The Nissan had no maps in it, and Harper had no idea of where she was. Reacher had only anecdotal knowledge of New Jersey geography. He knew how to get from A to B, and then from B to C, and then from C to D, but whether that was the most efficient direct route all the way from A to D, he had no idea. So he came out of the lot and headed for the turnpike on-ramp. He figured driving south for an hour would be a good start. He realized within a minute he was using the same road Lamarr had driven him on, just a few days before. It was raining lightly and the Nissan rode harder and lower than her big Buick. It was right down there in the tunnel of spray. The windshield was filmed with city grease and the wipers were blurring the view out with every alternate stroke. Smear, clear, smear, clear. The needle on the gas gauge was heading below a quarter.

“We should stop,” Harper said. “Get gas, clean the window.”

“And buy a map,” Reacher said.

He pulled off into the next service area. It was pretty much identical to the place Lamarr had used for lunch. Same layout, same buildings. He rolled through the rain to the gas pumps and left the car at the full-service island. The tank was full and the guy was cleaning the windshield when he got back, wet, carrying a colored map which unfolded awkwardly into a yard-square sheet.

“We’re on the wrong road,” he said. “Route 1 would be better.”

“OK, next exit,” Harper said, craning over. “Use 95 to jump across.”

She used her finger to trace south down Route 1. Found Fort Armstrong on the edge of the yellow shape that represented Trenton.

“Close to Fort Dix,” she said. “Where we were before. ”

Reacher said nothing. The guy finished with the windshield and Harper paid him through her window. Reacher wiped rain off his face with his sleeve and started the motor. Threaded his way back to the highway and watched for the turn onto 95.

I-95 was a mess, with heavy traffic. Route 1 was better. It curved through Highland Park and then ran dead straight for nearly twenty miles, all the way into Trenton. Reacher remembered Fort Armstrong as a left-hand turn coming north out of Trenton, so coming south it was a right-hand turn, onto another dead straight approach road, which took them all the way to a vehicle barrier outside a two-story brick guardhouse. Beyond the guardhouse were more roads and buildings. The roads were flat with whitewashed curbs and the buildings were all brick with radiused corners and external stairways made of welded tubular steel painted green. Window frames were metal. Classic Army architecture of the fifties, built with unlimited budgets and unlimited scope. Unlimited optimism.

"The U.S. military,” Reacher said. "We were kings of the world, back then.”

There was dimmed light in the guardhouse window next to the vehicle barrier. A sentry was visible, silhouetted against the light, bulky in a rain cape and helmet. He peered through the window and stepped to the door. Opened it up and came out to the car. Reacher buzzed his window down.

“You the guy who called the captain?” the sentry asked.

He was a heavy black guy. Low voice, slow accent from the Deep South. Far from home on a rainy night. Reacher nodded. The sentry grinned.

“He figured you might show up in person,” he said. “Go ahead in.”

He stepped back into the guardhouse and the barrier came up. Reacher drove carefully over the tire spikes and turned left.

“That was easy,” Harper said.

“You ever met a retired FBI agent?” Reacher asked.

“Sure, once or twice. Couple of the old guys.”

“How did you treat them?”

She nodded. “Like that guy treated you, I guess.”

“All organizations are the same,” he said. “Military police more so than the others, maybe. The rest of the Army hates you, so you stick together more.”

He turned right, then right again, then left.

“You been here before?” Harper asked.

“These places are all the same,” he said. “Look for the biggest flower bed, that’s where the general office is.”

She pointed. “That looks promising.”

He nodded. “You got the idea.”

The headlight beams played over a rose bed the size of an Olympic pool. The roses were just dormant stalks, sticking up out of a surface lumpy with horse manure and shredded bark. Behind them was a low symmetrical building with whitewashed steps leading up to double doors in the center. A light burned in a window in the middle of the left-hand wing.

“Duty office,” Reacher said. “The sentry called the captain soon as we were through the gate, so right now he’s walking down the corridor to the doors. Watch for the light.”

The fanlights above the doors lit up with a yellow glow.

“Now the outside lights,” Reacher said.

Two carriage lamps mounted on the door pillars lit up. Reacher stopped the car at the bottom of the steps.

“Now the doors open,” he said.

The doors opened inward and a man in uniform stepped through the gap.

“That was me, about a million years ago,” Reacher said.

The captain waited at the top of the steps, far enough out to be in the light from the carriage lamps, far enough in to be sheltered from the drizzle. He was a head shorter than Reacher had ever been, but he was broad and he looked fit. Dark hair neatly combed, plain steel eyeglasses. His uniform jacket was buttoned, but his face looked open enough. Reacher slid out of the Nissan and walked around the hood. Harper joined him at the foot of the whitewashed steps.

“Come in out of the rain,” the captain called.

His accent was East Coast urban. Bright and alert. He had an amiable smile. Looked like a decent guy. Reacher went up the steps first. Harper saw his shoes leaving wet stains on the whitewash. Glanced down and saw her own were doing the same thing.