The woman got up and came over to his table. It liked to be reliable, if nothing else. Maybe due at Irwin for a training exercise. The younger two stared at their phones, and fiddled with a larger device they tried to keep hidden, but which Reacher recognized as a NATO transceiver tied to a joint command network. The older couple fussed and stopped and started, as if they weren’t sure whether to blame each other, or reassure each other. They were going to be stranded overnight, and they didn’t like it. Or maybe not, because they looked just as upset as the older couple. Or liaison officers from friendly forces, out of uniform, maybe off duty. Which made sense, with Irwin a hop one way, and Edwards the other. The woman had short black hair, cut in a bob that just missed her collar. The guy had short brown hair, neatly brushed. Both were in worn denim jeans and T-shirts and old leather jackets. Like business travellers, except they weren’t dressed like it. He thought the older couple looked a little upset. The guy ducked down to a silent refrigerator and put a long-neck bottle on the bar. Which was good, because saucers implied cups, and cups implied coffee, which was what he wanted, black, no sugar. The candles were all set on porcelain saucers, all the same, white and sturdy, like hotelware crockery. There was a guy behind the bar, a lugubrious fellow, maybe seventy years old. Without power they looked like strings of dull grey pearls. There were icicle lights hanging from the ceiling. Each table also had a Christmas tree on it, about a foot high, made of feathery green plastic dusted with silver glitter. They were utility items, made of greasy white wax, from the hardware store, next to the dish mops and the kitchen matches. There were candles burning on the bar, and one on every table. He nodded a rueful all-in-the-same-boat greeting, and they all nodded back. They all looked like they had arrived not long before, the same way he had, huffing and puffing and stamping and clapping. There were two couples already in there, a man and a woman somewhere north of sixty, and another man and woman somewhere south of forty. He huffed and puffed, and clapped his hands together, and stamped on the mat. He stumbled in through the door, his back thickly coated with snow, his pants soaked to the thigh. The rocky tan desert was replaced by a smooth white blanket, as far as the eye could see. Especially when the snow was wet and heavy and three feet thick on the ground. The great state of California wasn’t so great with snow. Around Barstow no one called it anything, because the power went out immediately, and the phones went down, and the cell towers went off line. What also arrived on Christmas Eve was snow, in huge quantities, in what media elsewhere were quick to call a one-time freak once-in-a-lifetime storm of the century. Warm, dry, and reliable.īut not that particular year. But he knew both places from days of old, especially Irwin, which was a gigantic army training ground, where he had spent many a happy hour. On Christmas Eve Reacher arrived in a small town near Barstow, California, out in the desert halfway between Edwards Air Force Base and Fort Irwin. That particular year the plan worked as normal. Except the guy in the Santa suit, who was liable to pass out from heat exhaustion. Now the same thing was happening way to the south. Once he had read a newspaper story about homeowners in the northeast having such elaborate Christmas displays they needed new breaker panels. They looked pretty good, especially at night. In recent years he had seen more Christmas lights strung up in palm trees than in fir trees. Or Mexico, one year, after the State Department found it convenient to renew his passport. Usually the end of December would find him at his most distant point. By October at the latest he would start heading south.
Which imposed some kind of shape on his year. Except for one strong preference: he liked to be warm in winter. Jack Reacher was happy to play the hand he was dealt, and to live life the way it came. Can Reacher help them find their guy, or will an undercover assassin find him first? Two of them are British military police, separated by the weather from the VIP they are detailed to protect. Reacher finds refuge in a snowed-in roadhouse with four other strangers stranded by the storm. But the weather there is not warm and dry, as it’s supposed to be: he arrives in a freak blizzard. Jack Reacher likes to head south for the winter, to stay warm: so just before Christmas he arrives in a small town in Southern California.