by Lee Child
All six men turned and glanced at Reacher as he stepped inside. None of them spoke. But five men then glanced at the sixth, which Reacher guessed identified the sixth man as Mr. Lane. The boss. He was half a generation older than his men. He was in a gray suit. He had gray hair, buzzed close to his scalp. He was maybe an inch above average height, and slender. His face was pale and full of worry. He was standing absolutely straight, racked with tension, with his fingertips spread and touching the top of a table that held an old-fashioned telephone and a framed photograph of a pretty woman.
“This is the witness,” Gregory said.
No reply.
“He saw the driver,” Gregory said.
The man at the table glanced down at the phone and then moved away from it, toward Reacher, looking him up and down, assessing, evaluating. He stopped a yard away and offered his hand.
“Edward Lane,” he said. “I’m very pleased to meet you, sir.” His accent was American, originally from some hardscrabble place far from the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Arkansas, maybe, or rural Tennessee, but in either case overlaid by long exposure to the neutral tones of the military. Reacher said his own name and shook Lane’s hand. It was dry, not warm, not cold.
“Tell me what you saw,” Lane said.
“I saw a guy get in a car,” Reacher said. “He drove it away.”
“I need detail,” Lane said.
“Reacher is ex–U.S. Army CID,” Gregory said. “He described the Benz to perfection.”
“So describe the driver,” Lane said.
“I saw more of the car than the driver,” Reacher said.
“Where were you?”
“In a café. The car was a little north and east of me, across the width of Sixth Avenue. Maybe a twenty-degree angle, maybe ninety feet away.”
“Why were you looking at it?”
“It was badly parked. It looked out of place. I guessed it was on a fireplug.”
“It was,” Lane said. “Then what?”
“Then a guy crossed the street toward it. Not at a crosswalk. Through gaps in the traffic, at an angle. The angle was more or less the same as my line of sight, maybe twenty degrees. So most of what I saw was his back, all the way.”
“Then what?”
“He stuck the key in the door and got inside. Took off.”
“Going north, obviously, this being Sixth Avenue. Did he turn?”
“Not that I saw.”
“Can you describe him?”
“Blue jeans, blue shirt, blue baseball cap, white sneakers. The clothing was old and comfortable. The guy was average height, average weight.”
“Age?”
“I didn’t see his face. Most of what I saw was his back. But he didn’t move like a kid. He was at least in his thirties. Maybe forty.”
“How exactly did he move?”
“He was focused. He headed straight for the car. Not fast, but there was no doubt where he was going. The way he held his head, I think he was looking directly at the car the whole way. Like a definite destination. Like a target. And the way he held his shoulder, I think he might have had the key out in front of him, horizontally. Like a tiny lance. Focused, and intent. And urgent. That’s how he moved.”
“Where did he come from?”
“From behind my shoulder, more or less. He could have been walking north, and then stepped off the sidewalk at the café, north and east through the traffic.”
“Would you recognize him again?”
“Maybe,” Reacher said. “But only by his clothes and his walk and his posture. Nothing that would convince anyone.”
“If he crossed through the traffic he must have glanced south to see what was coming at him. At least once. So you should have seen the right side of his face. Then when he was behind the wheel, you should have seen the left side.”
“Narrow angles,” Reacher said. “And the light wasn’t great.”
“There must have been headlight beams on him.”
“He was white,” Reacher said. “No facial hair. That’s all I saw.”
“White male,” Lane said. “Thirty-five to forty-five. I guess that eliminates about eighty percent of the population, maybe more, but it’s not good enough.”
“Didn’t you have insurance?” Reacher asked.
“This is not about the car,” Lane said.
“It was empty,” Reacher said.
“It wasn’t empty,” Lane said.
“So what was in it?”
“Thank you, Mr. Reacher,” Lane said. “You’ve been very helpful.”
He turned and walked back to where he had started, next to the table with the phone and the photograph. He stood erect beside it and spread his fingers again and laid the tips lightly on the polished wood, right next to the telephone, like his touch might detect an incoming call before the electronic pulse started the bell.
“You need help,” Reacher said. “Don’t you?”
“Why would you care?” Lane asked.
“Habit,” Reacher said. “Reflex. Professional curiosity.”
“I’ve got help,” Lane said. He gestured with his free hand around the room. “Navy SEALs, Delta Force, Recon Marines, Green Berets, SAS from Britain. The best in the world.”
“You need a different kind of help. The guy who took your car, these folks can start a war against him, that’s for sure. But first you need to find him.”
No reply.
“What was in the car?” Reacher asked.
“Tell me about your career,” Lane said.
“It’s been over a long time. That’s its main feature.”
“Final rank?”
“Major.”
“Army CID?”
“Thirteen years.”
“Investigator?”
“Basically.”
“A good one?”
“Good enough.”
“110th Special Unit?”
“Some of the time. You?”
“Rangers and Delta. Started in Vietnam, ended in the Gulf the first time around. Started a second lieutenant, finished a full colonel.”
“What was in the car?”
Lane looked away. Held still and quiet for a long, long time. Then he looked back, like a decision had been made.
“You need to give me your word about something,” he said.
“Like what?”
“No cops. That’s going to be your first piece of advice, go to the cops. But I’ll refuse to do it, and I need your word that you won’t go behind my back.”
Reacher shrugged.
“OK,” he said.
“Say it.”
“No cops.”
“Say it again.”
“No cops,” Reacher said again.
“You got an ethical problem with that?”
“No,” Reacher said.
“No FBI, no nobody,” Lane said. “We handle this ourselves. Understand? You break your word, I’ll put your eyes out. I’ll have you blinded.”
“You’ve got a funny way of making friends.”
“I’m looking for help here, not friends.”
“My word is good,” Reacher said.
“Say you understand what I’ll do if you break it.”
Reacher looked around the room. Took it all in. A quiet desperate atmosphere and six Special Forces veterans, all full of subdued menace, all as hard as nails, all looking right back at him, all full of unit loyalty and hostile suspicion of the outsider.
“You’ll have me blinded,” Reacher said.
“You better believe it,” Lane said.
“What was in the car?”
Lane moved his hand away from the phone. He picked up the framed photograph. He held it two-handed, flat against his chest, high up, so that Reacher felt he had two people staring back at him. Above, Lane’s pale and worried features. Below, under glass, a woman of breathtaking classical beauty. Dark hair, green eyes, high cheekbones, a bud of a mouth, photographed with passion and expertise and printed by a master.
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“This is my wife,” Lane said.
Reacher nodded. Said nothing.
“Her name is Kate,” Lane said.
Nobody spoke.
“Kate disappeared late yesterday morning,” Lane said. “I got a call in the afternoon. From her kidnappers. They wanted money. That’s what was in the car. You watched one of my wife’s kidnappers collect their ransom.”
Nobody spoke.
“They promised to release her,” Lane said. “And it’s been twenty-four hours. And they haven’t called back.”
CHAPTER 3
Edward Lane held the framed photograph like an offering and Reacher stepped forward to take it. He tilted it to catch the light. Kate Lane was beautiful, no question about it. She was hypnotic. She was younger than her husband by maybe twenty years, which put her in her early thirties. Old enough to be all woman, young enough to be flawless. In the picture she was gazing at something just beyond the edge of the print. Her eyes blazed with love. Her mouth seemed ready to burst into a wide smile. The photographer had frozen the first tiny hint of it so that the pose seemed dynamic. It was a still picture, but it looked like it was about to move. The focus and the grain and the detail were immaculate. Reacher didn’t know much about photography, but he knew he was holding a high-end product. The frame alone might have cost what he used to make in a month, back in the army.
“My Mona Lisa,” Lane said. “That’s how I think of that picture.”
Reacher passed it back. “Is it recent?”
Lane propped it upright again, next to the telephone.
“Less than a year old,” he said.
“Why no cops?”
“There are reasons.”
“This kind of a thing, they usually do a good job.”
“No cops,” Lane said.
Nobody spoke.
“You were a cop,” Lane said. “You can do what they do.”
“I can’t,” Reacher said.
“You were a military cop. Therefore all things being equal you can do better than them.”
“All things aren’t equal. I don’t have their resources.”
“You can make a start.”
The room went very quiet. Reacher glanced at the phone, and the photograph.
“How much money did they want?” he asked.
“One million dollars in cash,” Lane answered.
“And that was in the car? A million bucks?”
“In the trunk. In a leather bag.”
“OK,” Reacher said. “Let’s all sit down.”
“I don’t feel like sitting down.”
“Relax,” Reacher said. “They’re going to call back. Probably very soon. I can pretty much guarantee that.”
“How?”
“Sit down. Start at the beginning. Tell me about yesterday.”
So Lane sat down, in the armchair next to the telephone table, and started to talk about the previous day. Reacher sat at one end of a sofa. Gregory sat next to him. The other five guys distributed themselves around the room, two sitting, two squatting on chair arms, one leaning against the wall.
“Kate went out at ten o’clock in the morning,” Lane said. “She was heading for Bloomingdale’s, I think.”
“You think?”
“I allow her some freedom of action. She doesn’t necessarily supply me with a detailed itinerary. Not every day.”
“Was she alone?”
“Her daughter was with her.”
“Her daughter?”
“She has an eight-year-old by her first marriage. Her name is Jade.”
“She lives with you here?”
Lane nodded.
“So where is Jade now?”
“Missing, obviously,” Lane said.
“So this is a double kidnapping?” Reacher said.
Lane nodded again. “Triple, in a way. Their driver didn’t come back, either.”
“You didn’t think to mention this before?”
“Does it make a difference? One person or three?”
“Who was the driver?”
“A guy called Taylor. British, ex-SAS. A good man. One of us.”
“What happened to the car?”
“It’s missing.”
“Does Kate go to Bloomingdale’s often?”
Lane shook his head. “Only occasionally. And never on a predictable pattern. We do nothing regular or predictable. I vary her drivers, vary her routes, sometimes we stay out of the city altogether.”
“Because? You got a lot of enemies?”
“My fair share. My line of work attracts enemies.”
“You’re going to have to explain your line of work to me. You’re going to have to tell me who your enemies are.”
“Why are you sure they’re going to call?”
“I’ll get to that,” Reacher said. “Tell me about the first conversation. Word for word.”
“They called at four o’clock in the afternoon. It went pretty much how you would expect. You know, we have your wife, we have your daughter.”
“Voice?”
“Altered. One of those electronic squawk boxes. Very metallic, like a robot in a movie. Loud and deep, but that doesn’t mean anything. They can alter the pitch and the volume.”
“What did you say to them?”
“I asked them what they wanted. They said a million bucks. I asked them to put Kate on the line. They did, after a short pause.” Lane closed his eyes. “She said, you know, help me, help me.” He opened his eyes. “Then the guy with the squawk box came back on and I agreed to the money. No hesitation. The guy said he would call back in an hour with instructions.”
“And did he?”
Lane nodded. “At five o’clock. I was told to wait six hours and put the money in the trunk of the Mercedes you saw and have it driven down to the Village and parked in that spot at eleven-forty exactly. The driver was to lock it up and walk away and put the keys through a mail slot in the front door of a certain building on the southwest corner of Spring Street and West Broadway. Then he was to walk away and keep on walking away, south on West Broadway. Someone would move in behind him and enter the building and collect the keys. If my driver stopped or turned around or even looked back, Kate would die. Likewise if there was a tracking device on the car.”
“That was it, word for word?”
Lane nodded.
“Nothing else?”
Lane shook his head.
“Who drove the car down?” Reacher asked.
“Gregory,” Lane said.
“I followed the instructions,” Gregory said. “To the letter. I couldn’t risk anything else.”
“How far of a walk was it?” Reacher asked him.
“Six blocks.”
“What was the building with the mail slot?”
“Abandoned,” Gregory said. “Or awaiting renovations. One or the other. It was empty, anyway. I went back there tonight, before I came to the café. No sign of habitation.”
“How good was this guy Taylor? Did you know him in Britain?”
Gregory nodded. “SAS is a big family. And Taylor was very good indeed.”
“OK,” Reacher said.
“OK what?” Lane said.
“There are some obvious early conclusions,” Reacher said.
CHAPTER 4
Reacher said, “The first conclusion is that Taylor is already dead. These guys clearly know you to some extent, and therefore we should assume they knew who and what Taylor was. Therefore they wouldn’t keep him alive. No reason for it. Too dangerous.”
Lane asked, “Why do you think they know me?”
“They asked for a specific car,” Reacher said. “And they suspected you might have a million dollars in cash lying around. They asked for it after the banks were closed and told you to deliver it before the banks reopened. Not everyone could comply with those conditions. Usually even very rich people take a little time to get a million bucks in cash together. They get temporary loans, wire transfers, they use stock as coll
ateral, stuff like that. But these guys seemed to know that you could just cough it up instantly.”
“How do they know me?”
“You tell me.”
Nobody spoke.
“And there are three of them,” Reacher said. “One to guard Kate and Jade wherever they took them. One to watch Gregory’s back while he walked south on West Broadway, on a cell phone to a third who was waiting to move in and pick up the keys as soon as it was safe.”
Nobody spoke.
“And they’re based a minimum two hundred miles upstate,” Reacher said. “Let’s assume the initial action went down before about eleven o’clock yesterday morning. But they didn’t call for more than five hours. Because they were driving. Then they issued instructions at five o’clock for a ransom drop more than six hours later. Because they needed the six hours because two of them had to drive all the way back. Five, six hours, that’s two hundred miles, maybe two fifty, maybe more.”
“Why upstate?” Lane said. “They could be anywhere.”
“Not south or west,” Reacher said. “Or they would have asked for the ransom car south of Canal, so they could head straight for the Holland Tunnel. Not east on Long Island, or they would have wanted to be near the Midtown Tunnel. No, north on Sixth was what they wanted. That implies they were happy to head up toward the George Washington Bridge, or the Henry Hudson and the Saw Mill, or the Triboro and the Major Deegan. Eventually they hit the Thruway, probably. They could be in the Catskills or anywhere. A farm, probably. Certainly somewhere with a big garage block or a barn.”
“Why?”
“They just inherited your Mercedes Benz. Right after hijacking whatever Taylor drove to Bloomingdale’s yesterday. They need a place to hide them.”
