by Lee Child
“You were right,” Reacher said. “Big crumbs. Not too shabby for a subcontractor.”
Pauling nodded. “The whole deal was worth a hundred and five million. U.S. dollars in cash from their government’s central reserve. Lane got twenty percent in exchange for supplying half the manpower and agreeing to do most of the work.”
“Beggars can’t be choosers,” Reacher said.
Then he said: “OK.”
“OK what?”
“What’s half of twenty-one?”
“Ten and a half.”
“Exactly. Kate’s ransom was exactly half of the Burkina Faso payment.”
Silence in the room.
“Ten and a half million dollars,” Reacher said. “It always was a weird amount. But now it makes some kind of sense. Lane probably skimmed fifty percent as his profit. So Hobart got home and figured he was entitled to Lane’s share for his suffering.”
“Reasonable,” Pauling said.
“I would have wanted more,” Reacher said. “I would have wanted all of it.”
Pauling slid her fingernail down the fine print on the H page of the phone book and used the speaker to try the first two Hobart numbers again. She got the same two answering machines. She hung up. Her little office went quiet. Then her cell buzzed again. This time she unclipped the charger first and flipped the phone open. Said her name and listened for a moment and then turned to another fresh page in her yellow pad and wrote just three lines.
Then she closed her phone.
“We have his address,” she said.
CHAPTER 35
Pauling said, “Hobart moved in with his sister. To a building on Hudson Street that I’m betting is on the block between Clarkson and Leroy.”
“A married sister,” Reacher said. “Otherwise we would have found her name in the phone book.”
“Widowed,” Pauling said. “I guess she kept her married name, but she lives alone now. Or at least she did, until her brother came home from Africa.”
The widowed sister was called Dee Marie Graziano and she was right there in the phone book at an address on Hudson. Pauling dialed up a city tax database and confirmed her domicile.
“Rent-stabilized,” she said. “Been there ten years. Even with the cheap lease it’s going to be a small place.” She copied Dee Marie’s Social Security number and pasted it into a box in a different database. “Thirty-eight years old. Marginal income. Doesn’t work much. Doesn’t even get close to paying federal income taxes. Her late husband was a Marine, too. Lance Corporal Vincent Peter Graziano. He died three years ago.”
“In Iraq?”
“I can’t tell.” Pauling closed the databases and opened Google and typed Dee Marie Graziano. Hit the return key. Glanced at the results and something about them made her click off Google and open LexisNexis. The screen rolled down and came up with a whole page of citations.
“Well, look at this,” she said.
“Tell me,” Reacher said.
“She sued the government. State and the DoD.”
“For what?”
“For news about her brother.”
Pauling hit the print button and fed Reacher the pages one by one as they came off the machine. He read the hard copy and she read the screen. Dee Marie Graziano had waged a five-year campaign to find out what had happened to her brother Clay James Hobart. It had been a long, hard, bitter campaign. That was for sure. At the outset Hobart’s employer Edward Lane of Operational Security Consultants had signed an affidavit swearing that Hobart had been a subcontractor for the United States Government at the relevant time. So Dee Marie had gone ahead and petitioned her congressman and both her senators. She had called out of state to the chairmen of the Armed Services Committees in both the House and the Senate. She had written to newspapers and talked to journalists. She had been prepped for the Larry King show but had been canceled prior to the recording. She had hired an investigator, briefly. Finally she had found a pro bono lawyer and sued the Department of Defense. The Pentagon had denied any knowledge of Clay James Hobart’s activities subsequent to his last day in a USMC uniform. Then Dee Marie had sued the Department of State. Some fifth-rung State lawyer had come back and promised that Hobart would be put on file as a tourist missing in West Africa. So Dee Marie had gone back to pestering journalists and had filed a string of Freedom of Information Act petitions. More than half of them had already been denied and the others were still choked in red tape.
“She was really going at it,” Pauling said. “Wasn’t she? Metaphorically she was lighting a candle for her brother every single day for five years.”
“Like Patti Joseph,” Reacher said. “This is a tale of two sisters.”
“The Pentagon knew Hobart was alive after twelve months. And they knew where he was. But they kept quiet for four years. They let this poor woman suffer.”
“What was she going to do anyway? Lock and load and go to Africa and rescue him single-handed? Bring him back to stand trial for Anne Lane’s homicide?”
“There was never any evidence against him.”
“Whatever, keeping her in the dark was probably the best policy.”
“Spoken like a true military man.”
“Like the FBI is a fount of free information?”
“She could have gone over there and petitioned the new government in Burkina Faso personally.”
“That only works in the movies.”
“You’re very cynical, you know that?”
“I don’t have a cynical bone in my body. I’m realistic, is all. Shit happens.”
Pauling went quiet.
“What?” Reacher said.
“You said lock and load. You said Dee Marie could lock and load and go to Africa.”
“No, I said she couldn’t.”
“But we agree that Hobart picked up a new partner, right?” she said. “As soon as he got back? One that he trusts, and real fast?”
“Clearly,” Reacher said.
“Could it be the sister?”
Reacher said nothing.
“The trust would be there,” Pauling said. “Wouldn’t it? Automatically? And she was there, which would explain the speed. And the commitment would have been there, on her part. Commitment, and a lot of anger. So is it possible that the voice you heard on the car phone was a woman?”
Reacher was quiet for a beat.
“It’s possible,” he said. “I guess. I mean, it never struck me that way. Never. But that could just be a preconception on my part. An unconscious bias. Because those machines are tough. They could make Minnie Mouse sound like Darth Vader.”
“You said there was a lightness to the voice. Like a small man.”
Reacher nodded. “Yes, I did.”
“Therefore like a woman. With the pitch altered an octave, it’s plausible.”
“It could be,” Reacher said. “Certainly whoever it was knew the West Village streets pretty well.”
“Like a ten-year resident would. Plus military jargon, from having had a husband and a brother in the Marine Corps.”
“Maybe,” Reacher said. “Gregory told me a woman showed up in the Hamptons. A fat woman.”
“Fat?”
“Gregory said heavyset.”
“Surveillance?”
“No, she and Kate talked. They went walking on the beach.”
“Maybe it was Dee Marie. Maybe she’s fat. Maybe she was asking for money. Maybe Kate blew her off and that was the last straw.”
“This is about more than money.”
“But that doesn’t mean this isn’t at least partly about money,” Pauling said. “And judging by where she’s living Dee Marie needs money. Her share would be more than five million dollars. She might think of it like compensation. For five years of stonewalling. A million dollars a year.”
“Maybe,” Reacher said again.
“It’s a hypothesis,” Pauling said. “We shouldn’t rule it out.”
“No,” Reacher said. “We shouldn’t.”
“They’re south of Houston,” she said. “Between Vandam and Charlton. Not between Clarkson and Leroy. We were wrong.”
“Maybe they like a bar a few blocks north,” Reacher said. “He couldn’t have called himself Charlton Vandam anyway. That’s way too phony.”
“Whatever, they’re only fifteen minutes from here.”
“Don’t get your hopes up. This is another brick in the wall, that’s all. One or both of them, whichever, they must be long gone already. They’d be crazy to stick around.”
“You think?”
“They’ve got blood on their hands and money in their pockets, Pauling. They’ll be in the Caymans by now. Or Bermuda, or Venezuela, or wherever the hell people go these days.”
“So what do we do?”
“We head over to Hudson Street, and we hope like crazy that the trail is still a little bit warm.”
CHAPTER 36
Between them in their previous lives and afterward Reacher and Pauling had approached probably a thousand buildings that may or may not have contained hostile suspects. They knew exactly how to do it. There was efficient back-and-forth tactical discussion. They were coming from a position of weakness, in that neither of them was armed and Hobart had met Pauling twice before. She had interviewed Lane’s whole crew at length after Anne Lane’s disappearance. Chances were Hobart would remember her even after the traumatic five-year interval. Balancing those disadvantages was Reacher’s strong conviction that the Hudson Street apartment would be empty. He expected to find nothing there except hastily tossed closets and one last can of rotting trash.
There was no doorman. It wasn’t that kind of a building. It was a boxy five-story tenement faced with dull red brick and a black iron fire escape. It was the last hold-out on a block full of design offices and bank branches. It had a chipped black door with an aluminum squawk box chiseled sideways into the frame. Ten black buttons. Ten nametags. Graziano was written neatly against 4L.
“Walk-up,” Pauling said. “Central staircase. Long thin front-to-back apartments, two to a floor, one on the left, one on the right. Four-L will be on the fourth floor, on the left.”
Reacher tried the door. It was locked and solid.
“What’s at the back?” he asked.
“Probably an air shaft between this and the back of the building on Greenwich.”
“We could rappel off the roof and come in through her kitchen window.”
“I trained for that at Quantico,” Pauling said. “But I never did it for real.”
“Neither did I,” Reacher said. “Not a kitchen. I did a bathroom window once.”
“Was that fun?”
“Not really.”
“So what shall we do?”
Normally Reacher would have hit a random button and claimed to be a UPS or FedEx guy. But he wasn’t sure whether that would work with this particular building. Courier deliveries probably weren’t regular occurrences there. And he figured it was almost four o’clock in the afternoon. Not a plausible time for pizza or Chinese food. Too late for lunch, too early for dinner. So he just hit every button except 4L’s and said in a loud slurred voice, “Can’t find my key.” And at least two households must have had an errant member missing because the door buzzed twice and Pauling pushed it open.
Inside was a dim center hallway with a narrow staircase on the right. The staircase ran up one floor and then doubled back and started over again at the front of the building. It was covered in cracked linoleum. It was illuminated with low wattage bulbs. It looked like a death trap.
“Now what?” Pauling asked.
“Now we wait,” Reacher said. “At least two people are going to be sticking their heads out looking for whoever lost their key.”
So they waited. One minute. Two. Way above them in the gloom a door opened. Then closed again. Then another door opened. Closer. Second floor, maybe. Thirty seconds later it slammed shut.
“OK,” Reacher said. “Now we’re good to go.”
He put his weight on the bottom tread of the staircase and it creaked loudly. The second tread was the same. And the third. As he stepped onto the fourth Pauling started up behind him. By the time he was halfway up the whole structure was creaking and cracking like small arms fire.
They made it to the second floor hallway with no reaction from anywhere.
In front of them at the top of the stairs were two paired doors, one on the left and one on the right. 2L and 2R. Clearly these were railroad flats with front-to-back corridors that dog-legged halfway along their lengths to accommodate the entrances. Probably there were wall-mounted coat hooks just inside the doors. Straight ahead to the living rooms. Kitchens in the back. Turn back on yourself at the door, you would find the bathroom, and then the bedroom at the front of the building, overlooking the street.
“Not so bad,” Reacher said, quietly.
Pauling said, “I wouldn’t want to carry my groceries up to five.”
Since childhood Reacher had never carried groceries into a home. He said, “You could throw a rope off the fire escape. Haul them up through the bedroom.”
Pauling said nothing to that. They turned one-eighty together and walked the length of the hallway to the foot of the next flight of stairs. Stepped noisily up to three. 3L and 3R were right there in front of them, identical to the situation one floor below and presumably identical to the situation one floor above.
“Let’s do it,” Reacher said.
They walked through the hallway and turned and glanced up into the fourth floor gloom. They could see 4R’s door. Not 4L’s. Reacher went first. He took the stairs two at a time to cut the number of creaks and cracks by half. Pauling followed, putting her feet near the edges of the treads where any staircase is quieter. They made it to the top. Stood there. The building hummed with the kind of subliminal background noises you find in any packed dwelling in a big city. Muted traffic sounds from the street. The blare of car horns and the wail of sirens, dulled by the thickness of walls. Ten refrigerators running, window air conditioners, room fans, TV, radio, electricity buzzing through faulty fluorescent ballasts, water flowing through pipes.
4L’s door had been painted a dull institutional green many years previously. Old, but there was nothing wrong with the job. Probably a union painter, well trained by a long and painstaking apprenticeship. The careful sheen was overlaid with years of grime. Soot from buses, grease from kitchens, rail dust from the subways. There was a clouded spy lens about level with Reacher’s chest. The 4 and the L were separate cast-brass items attached straight and true with brass screws.
Reacher turned sideways and bent forward from the waist. Put his ear on the crack where the door met the jamb. Listened for a moment.
Then he straightened up.
“There’s someone in there,” he whispered.
CHAPTER 37
Reacher bent forward and listened again. “Straight ahead. A woman, talking.” Then he straightened up and stepped back. “What’s the layout going to be?”
“A short hallway,” Pauling whispered. “Narrow for six feet, until it clears the bathroom. Then maybe it opens out to the living room. The living room will be maybe twelve feet long. The back wall will have a window on the left into the light well. Kitchen door on the right. The kitchen will be bumped out to the back. Maybe six or seven feet deep.”
Reacher nodded. Worst case, the woman was in the kitchen, a maximum twenty-five feet away down a straight and direct line of sight to the door. Worse than worst case, she had a loaded gun next to her on the countertop and she knew how to shoot.
Pauling asked, “Who’s she talking to?”
Reacher whispered, “I don’t know.”
“It’s them, isn’t it?”
“They’d be nuts to still be here.”
“Who else can it be?”
Reacher said nothing.
Pauling asked, “What do you want to
do?”
“What would you do?”
“Get a warrant. Call a SWAT team. Full body armor and a battering ram.”
“Those days are gone.”
“Tell me about it.”
Reacher took another step back. Pointed at 4R’s door.
“Wait there,” he said. “If you hear shooting, call an ambulance. If you don’t, follow me in six feet behind.”
“You’re just going to knock?”
“No,” Reacher said. “Not exactly.”
He took another step back. He was six feet five inches tall and weighed about two hundred and fifty pounds. His shoes were bench-made by a company called Cheaney, from Northampton in England. Smarter buys than Church’s, which were basically the same shoes but with a premium tag for the name. The style Reacher had chosen was called Tenterden, which was a brown semi-brogue made of heavy pebbled leather. Size twelve. The soles were heavy composite items bought in from a company called Dainite. Reacher hated leather soles. They wore out too fast and stayed wet too long after rain. Dainites were better. Their heels were a five-layer stack an inch and a quarter thick. The Cheaney leather welt, the Dainite welt, two slabs of hard Cheaney leather, and a thick Dainite cap.
Each shoe on its own weighed more than two pounds.
4L’s door had three keyholes. Three locks. Probably good ones. Maybe a chain inside. But door furniture is only as good as the wood it is set into. The door itself was probably hundred-year-old Douglas fir. Same for the frame. Cheap to start with, damp and swelled all through a hundred summers, dry and shrunken all through a hundred winters. A little eaten-out and wormy.
“Stand by now,” Reacher whispered.
He put his weight on his back foot and stared at the door and bounced like a high jumper going for a record. Then he launched. One pace, two. He smashed his right heel into the door just above the knob and wood splintered and dust filled the air and the door smashed open and he continued running without breaking stride. Two paces put him in the center of the living room. He stopped dead there. Just stood still and stared. Lauren Pauling crowded in behind him and stopped at his shoulder.
