in uniform. Showing off on the range? Would they give him a uniform and a rifle to play with if he wasn't one of their own?"
Johnson spooled the tape back and froze it. Looked at Holly for a long moment. Then he walked out of the trailer. Called over his shoulder to Webster.
"Director, we need to go to work," he said. "I want to make a contingency plan well ahead of time. No reason for us not to be ready for this."
Webster followed him out. Brogan and Milosevic stayed at the video console. McGrath was watching Garber. Garber was staring at the blank screen.
"I still don't believe it," he said.
He turned and saw McGrath looking at him. Nodded him out of the trailer. The two men walked together into the silence of the night.
"I can't prove it to you," Garber said. "But Reacher is on our side. I'll absolutely guarantee that, personally."
"Doesn't look that way," McGrath said. "He's the classic type. Fits our standard profile perfectly. Unemployed ex-military, malcontent, dislocated childhood, probably full of all kinds of grievances."
Garber shook his head.
"He's none of those things," he said. "Except unemployed ex-military. He was a fine officer. Best I ever had. You're making a big mistake."
McGrath saw the look on Garber's face.
"So you'd trust him?" he asked. "Personally?"
Garber nodded grimly.
"With my life," he said. "I don't know why he's there, but I promise you he's clean, and he's going to do what needs doing, or he's going to die trying."
EXACTLY SIX MILES north, Holly was trusting to the same instinct. They had taken her disassembled bed away, and she was lying on the thin mattress on the floorboards. They had taken the soap and the shampoo and the towel from the bathroom as a punishment. They had left the small pool of blood from the dead woman's head untouched. It was there on the floor, a yard from her makeshift bed. She guessed they thought it would upset her. They were wrong. It made her happy. She was happy to watch it dry and blacken. She was thinking about Jackson and staring at the stain like it was a Rorschach blot telling her: you're coming out of the shadow now, Holly.
WEBSTER AND JOHNSON came up with a fairly simple contingency plan. It depended on geography. The exact same geography they assumed had tempted Borken to choose Yorke as the location for his bastion. Like all plans based on geography, it was put together using a map. Like all plans put together using a map, it was only as good as the map was accurate. And like most maps, theirs was way out of date.
They were using a large-scale map of Montana. Most of its information was reliable. The main features were correct. The western obstacle was plain to see.
"We assume the river is impassable, right?" Webster said.
"Right," Johnson agreed. "The spring melts are going to be in full flow. Nothing we can do there before Monday. When we get some equipment."
The roads were shown in red like a man had placed his right hand palm-down on the paper. The small towns of Kalispell and Whitefish nestled under the palm. Roads fanned out like the four fingers and the thumb. The index finger ran up through a place called Eureka to the Canadian border. The thumb ran out northwest through Yorke and stopped at the old mines. That thumb was now amputated at the first knuckle.
"They assume you'll come up the road," Johnson said. "So you won't. You'll loop east to Eureka and come in through the forest."
He ran his pencil down the thumb and across the back of the hand. Back up the index finger and stopped it at Eureka. Fifty miles of forest lay between Eureka and Yorke. The forest was represented on the map by a large green stain. Deep and wide. They knew what that green stain meant. They could see what it meant by looking around them. The area was covered in virgin forest. It ran rampant up and down the mountainsides. Most places, the vegetation was so dense a man could barely squeeze between the tree trunks. But the green stain to the east of Yorke was a national forest. Owned and operated by the Forest Service. The green stain showed a web of threads running through it. Those threads were Forest Service tracks.
"I can get my people here in four hours," Webster said. "The Hostage Rescue Team. On my own initiative, if it comes to it."