Tony Jackson said: 'You would say that anyway.'
'I would have stopped talking after I told Ms Ness I don't have a phone.'
'Annie,' she said.
'I would have laid low at that point. I would have aroused no further suspicion.'
Jackson said: 'We need to get out of here.'
'That's going to be difficult.'
'How would you do it?'
'I wouldn't. I'm not looking for a guy. I would stay here. Maybe buy myself a bag of potato chips.'
'We can't stay here.'
'Why not?'
Jackson didn't answer. At the other table the older lady seemed to be urging her husband to go do some particular thing. She was practically poking and prodding. Eventually the guy got up and crossed the room and came to a stop at Reacher's table, with Ness on his left, and Reacher dead ahead, and Jackson on his right.
'Excuse me,' he said. 'My wife wondered if you were perhaps discussing a way out of here. If so, she wondered if you would perhaps include us in your party. There are no facilities here. There are no beds. There is no food, and no adequate heating. My wife feels we'll freeze to death, or starve.'
'Happy Christmas,' Reacher said.
'Perhaps you have a large and capable vehicle.'
'We don't. But if we figure something out, you'll be the first to know, OK?'
'Thank you,' the old guy said, and he turned and walked back to his own table, where he sat down and whispered to his wife. Presumably updating her on his progress. When he finished she nodded once, but she didn't look any happier.
Reacher said: 'What's so urgent up at Irwin?'
Jackson asked: 'Can you help us?'
'How could I? I'm retired.'
'You could call the MP barracks. You might still know someone. You could mention the 110th. I'm sure that makes people want to help.'
'Usually it makes people want to shoot me in the face. Anyway, communications are down.'
Jackson nodded. 'The Nato net needs a plane in the air. This will blow over in an hour, surely. They'll get one back up. You could ask Irwin to send a helicopter.'
'I could ask for a dinner date with Miss California, too. And a million dollars in cash. I wonder which I would get first?'
'This is serious, Reacher.'
'Says you.'
Annie Ness glanced both ways and hunched forward and whispered: 'We're a close protection detail. Bodyguards, basically. We got separated from our principal. We think he's at Irwin without us. Or stuck somewhere along the way.'
'Who is he?'
Jackson said: 'Can't tell you.'
Ness said: 'Our Minister of Defence. Spelled with a letter c.'
'You're kidding,' Reacher said. 'On Christmas Eve?'
'Exactly. A super-secret meeting. Who would expect it?'
'Is he on his own?'
'He went in the lead car. He wanted to talk to his aide in private. We were in the trail car. We spun off but they didn't see and they drove on.'
'A super-secret meeting with who?'
'Your Secretary of Defense, spelled with a letter s.'
'That's a fairly big deal.'
'Our briefing made it sound like the fate of the world hangs in the balance.'
'Possibly exaggerated.'
'But still,' she said.
'They're at Fort Irwin,' Reacher said. 'They'll be OK. It's a secure facility. There are lots of men with guns.'
'Unless he got stuck somewhere along the way.'
'Let's assume he didn't.'
'We can't assume,' Ness said, and then she said nothing more.
Jackson said: 'We could search with the helicopter.'
'There is no helicopter,' Reacher said. 'Who do you think I am?'
'We need to find our guy.'
'Is this about saving face? That train left the station long ago.'
'It's about saving lives.'
'You think he's going to starve, too? I bet the aide put a sandwich in his briefcase. That's what those guys are for.'
No answer. No reaction. No smile.
Reacher said: 'This is serious, isn't it?'
'I told you it was.'
'You know of a specific threat.''There's been some internet chatter. Most of it coherent. There's been a name repeated over and over. We think it's the name of an operator or an agent. Always the same in every language, as if it's more of a description than a name, as if it derives from a physical characteristic.'
'What's the name?'
'The Christmas Scorpion.'
'What kind of physical characteristic would that be? What does a Christmas scorpion even look like?'
'We don't know. But obviously the guy is a superstar. They talk about him like Lionel Messi.'
'Who?'
'Football player.'
'Soccer,' Ness said. 'Barcelona.'
'Like Cristiano Ronaldo at Real Madrid,' Reacher said.
'Exactly. This guy is top five in the world. And he knows about the meeting.'
'We need a helicopter,' Jackson said.
Reacher looked out of the window. The snow had stopped falling. The sky was lightening.
He said: 'First we need Nato.'
Jackson looked at the transceiver, down in his lap. No signal. The old guy at the other table coughed to get attention, and looked over, optimistically, hoping for good news.
Reacher whispered: 'We can't leave them behind. They'll tell the papers the military evacuated us but not them. They'll cause a scandal. And we should take them anyway. No beds, no food. This is a state of emergency.'
Jackson looked down and said: 'Nato is back.'
'Get the CO in the MP barracks.'
Jackson did, after a lot of back and forth. He handed the transceiver to Reacher, who said: 'Look up DCR 120 in your code book, and call me back on this frequency.'
He clicked off.
Ness asked: 'What's DCR 120?'
'A solid gold promise he's about to get a medal and a promotion.'
'Is he?'
'Depends what happens next.'
The guy came back on the line. Reacher asked for everything short of the dinner date and the million bucks in cash. The guy agreed. He said a Black Hawk would be there in 20 minutes.
The older lady tightened the scarf around her neck, and buttoned her coat. She seemed equal parts excited and worried about the helicopter, which arrived five minutes early, dropping low where the road was buried, kicking up a whole new blizzard, hovering with its wheels in the snow, but not set down, because who knew what the snow was hiding?
Reacher floundered out to meet it, keeping low, and he ushered the older lady past him, and turned back into the artificial blizzard for her husband, so he didn't see the same blizzard catch the older lady's scarf, and flap it up, thereby for a split second exposing a small round tattoo in the pit of her throat, the size of a silver dollar, of a Christmas wreath complete with leaves and bows and candles, all surrounding the black silhouette of a scorpion.
The Black Hawk was a roomy machine, but basic inside, with all kinds of wires and belts and straps and webbing, and nothing to sit on except canvas slings bolted to the bulkheads.
Not like a commercial airliner. Not even economy class. It was a deafening metal box full of snow, kicked up through the door by the beating rotor.
Annie Ness got the older couple situated, and then she sat down next to Tony Jackson.
Reacher gave the pilot a wait-one gesture, and he plugged in headsets for Ness and Jackson and himself, so they could confer with the crew over the scream of the engines.
The pilot looked back, and Reacher said: 'We have two humanitarian evacuations, plus two British Army MPs actively searching for a high-ranking official from their own government, who may or may not have made it by road to Irwin after the storm started, and who currently has a credible security threat against him.'
