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The Bell clattered onward, turning east of north, climbing a little higher, heading for darkness. It crossed a highway far below, a river of white lights crawling west and red lights crawling east.
He liked 97 because it was the largest two-digit prime number, and he loved 81 because it was absolutely the only number out of all the literally infinite possibilities whose square root was also the sum of its digits.
Tony Swan, Jorge Sanchez, Calvin Franz, Frances Neagley, Stanley Lowrey, Manuel Orozco, David O’Donnell, and Karla Dixon.
‘Not e-mail,’ he said. ‘Regular mail. That’s what he did. He backed up his stuff onto some kind of a disk and every night he put it in an envelope and dropped it in the mail. Addressed to himself. To his post office box. Because that’s where he got his mail. In the post office. There’s no slot in his door. Once the envelope was out of his hand it was safe. It was in the system. With a whole bunch of custodians looking after it all day and all night.’
‘What number would you use?’ ‘Six characters? I’d probably write out my birthday, month, day, year, and find the nearest prime number.’ Then he thought for a second and said, ‘Actually that would be a problem, because there would be two equally close, one exactly seven less and one exactly seven more. So I guess I’d use the square root instead, rounded to three decimal places. Ignore the decimal point, that would give me six numbers, all different.’ ‘Weird,’ Neagley said.
Facts were to be faced, not fought.
‘Time to shit or get off the pot.
‘We investigate, we prepare, we execute. We find them, we take them down, and then we piss on their ancestors’ graves.’
Because, second rule, learned from a lifetime of bad luck and trouble: maintain a little dignity.
‘You tell a lot of lies, Ms Berenson,’ he said. Berenson said nothing. Neagley said, ‘She’s human resources. It’s what they do.’
Years before, a pedantic schoolteacher in the Pacific somewhere had explained to Reacher that first comes twilight, and then comes dusk, and then comes night. She had insisted that twilight and dusk were not the same thing. If he needed a generic word for evening darkness, he was to use gloaming.
