by Lee Child
Maybe 59th. But no further, surely. Sixty-eighth was a stop too far. Well into the Upper East Side. A whole new neighbourhood. If she was headed all the way up there, she would have used the Lincoln Tunnel, not the Holland, and she would have driven farther north before she parked. Because time was tight for her. So the 59th Street station was her upper limit. But having gotten wherever she was going, I felt she would have aimed to double back, even if just a little. Amateur psychology. Approach from the south, overshoot, come back from the north. And hope her opponents were facing the wrong way.
So I drew a box in my head, 42nd Street to 59th, and Fifth Avenue to Third. Sixty-eight square blocks. Containing what?
About eight million different things.
I stopped counting them well before we hit Philadelphia. By then I was distracted by the girl across the aisle. She was in her middle twenties, and completely spectacular. Maybe a model. maybe an actress, maybe just a great-looking lawyer or lobbyist. A total babe, as a USC jock might say. Which got me thinking about Peter Molina again, and the apparent contradiction in someone expert enough to use him for leverage against a source that was worthless.
Our principal brought a whole crew. New York City has six main public transportation gateways: Newark, LaGuardia, and JFK airports, plus Penn Station and Grand Central Terminal, plus the Port Authority bus depot. Newark has three terminals, LaGuardia has three plus the shuttle terminal, JFK has eight, Penn Station is big, Grand Central is huge, and the Port Authority is a warren. Total manpower required to make a sensible attempt at surveillance would run close to forty people. Eighty or more, to allow for round-the-clock coverage. And eighty people was an army, not a crew. So I got off the train with no more than normal caution.
Which, fortunately, was enough.
TWENTY- SEVEN
I saw the watcher immediately. He was leaning on a pillar in the centre of the Penn Station concourse, inert, with the kind of complete physical immobility that comes from being settled in for a long period of duty. He was stock-still, and the world was moving busily past him, like a river flows around a rock. He had a clamshell phone in his hand, open, held low down against his thigh. He was a tall guy, but reedy. Young, maybe thirty. At first sight, not impressive. He had pale skin with a shaved head and a dusting of ginger stubble. Not a great look. Scarier than an autograph hunter, maybe, but not by much. He was dressed in a shirt with a floral pattern and over it was a short tight leather jacket that was probably brown, but which looked lurid orange under the lights. He was staring at the oncoming crowd with eyes that had long ago grown tired, and then bored.
The concourse was full of people. I moved with the flow, slowly, hemmed in. I was carried along on the current. The watcher was about thirty feet away, ahead and on my left. His eyes were not moving. He was letting people walk through a fixed field of vision. I was about ten feet away from it. It was going to be like stepping through a metal detector hoop at the airport.
I slowed a little, and someone bumped into my back. I turned briefly, to check that they weren’t tag-teaming me. They weren’t. The person behind me was a woman with a stroller the size of an SUV, with two babies in it, maybe twins. There are a lot of twins in New York City. Plenty of older mothers, therefore plenty of laboratory fertilization. The twins in the stroller behind me were both crying, maybe because it was late and they were tired, or maybe they were just confused and bewildered by the forest of legs all around them. Their noise blended with the general hubbub. The concourse was tiled and full of echoes.
I drifted left, aiming to move six lateral feet in the next ten forward. I got near the edge of the stream and passed through the watcher’s point of focus. His eyes were bright blue, but filmed with fatigue. He didn’t react. Not at first. Then after a long second’s delay his eyes opened wider and he raised his phone and flicked the lid to light the screen. He glanced at it. Glanced back at me. His mouth opened in surprise. By that point I was about four feet away from him.
Then he fainted. I lunged forward and caught him and lowered him gently to the ground. A Good Samaritan, helping out with a sudden medical emergency. That was what people saw, anyway. But only because people see what they want to see. If they had replayed the brief sequence in their heads and scrutinized it very carefully they might have noticed that I had lunged slightly before the guy had started to fall. They might have noticed that whereas my right hand was certainly moving to catch him by the collar, it was only moving a split second after my left hand had already stabbed him in the solar plexus, very hard, but close in to our bodies, hidden and surreptitious.
But people see what they want to see. They always have, and they always will. I crouched over the guy like the responsible member of the public I was pretending to be, and the woman with the stroller trundled on behind me. After that, a small crowd gathered, full of concern. New York’s hostile reputation is undeserved. People are generally very helpful. A woman crouched down next to me. Other people stood close and looked down. I could see their legs and their shoes. The guy in the leather jacket was flat on the floor, twitching with chest spasms and gasping desperately for air. A hard blow to the solar plexus will do that to a person. But so will a heart attack and any number of other medical conditions.
The woman next to me asked, ‘What happened?’
I said, ‘I don’t know. He just keeled over. His eyes rolled up.’
‘We should call the ambulance.’
I said, ‘I dropped my phone.’
The woman started to fumble in her purse. I said, ‘Wait. He might have had an episode. We need to check if he’s carrying a card.’
‘An episode?’
‘An attack. Like a seizure. Like epilepsy, or something.’
‘What kind of a card?’
‘People carry them. With instructions. We might have to stop him biting his tongue. And maybe he has medication with him. Check his pockets.’
The woman reached out and patted the guy’s jacket pockets, on the outside. She had small hands, long fingers, lots of rings. The guy’s outside pockets were empty. Nothing there. The woman folded the jacket back and checked inside. I watched, carefully. The shirt was unlike anything I had ever seen. Acrylic, floral, a riot of pastel colours. The jacket was cheap and stiff. Lined with nylon. There was an inside label, quite ornate, with Cyrillic writing on it.
The guy’s inside pockets were empty, too.
‘Try his pants,’ I said. ‘Quick.’
The woman said, ‘I can’t do that.’
So some take-charge executive dropped down next to us and stuck his fingers in the guy’s front pants pockets. Nothing there. He used the pocket flaps to roll the guy first one way and then the other, to check the back pockets. Nothing there, either.
Nothing anywhere. No wallet, no ID, no nothing at all.
‘OK, we better call the ambulance,’ I said. ‘Do you see my phone?’
The woman looked around and then burrowed under the guy’s arm and came back with the clamshell cell. The lid got moved on the way and the screen lit up. My picture was right there on it, big and obvious. Better quality than I thought it would be. Better than the Radio Shack guy’s attempt. The woman glanced at it. I knew people kept pictures on their phones. I’ve seen them. Their partners, their dogs, their cats, their kids. Like a home page, or wallpaper. Maybe the woman thought I was a big-time egotist who used a picture of himself. But she handed me the phone anyway. By that time the take-charge executive was already dialling the emergency call. So I backed away and said, ‘I’ll go find a cop.’
I forced my way into the tide of people again and let it carry me onward, out the door, to the sidewalk, into the dark, and away.
TWENTY-EIGHT
Now i wasn’t that guy any more. No longer the only man in the world without a cell phone. I stopped in the hot darkness three blocks away on Seventh Avenue and looked over my prize. It was made by Motorola. Grey plastic, somehow treated and polished to make it look like metal. I fiddled my way throu
gh the menus and found no pictures other than my own. It had come out quite well. The cross street west of Eighth, the bright morning sun, me frozen in the act of turning around in response to my shouted name. There was plenty of detail, from head to toe. Clearly huge numbers of megapixels had been involved. I could make out my features fairly well. And I thought I looked pretty good, considering I had hardly slept. There were cars and a dozen bystanders nearby, to give a sense of scale, like the ruler painted on the wall behind a police mug shot. My posture looked exactly like what I see in the mirror. Very characteristic.
I had been nailed but good, photographically.
That was for damn sure.
I went back to the call register menu and checked for calls dialled. There were none recorded. I checked calls received, and found only three, all within the last three hours, all from the same number. I guessed the watcher was supposed to delete information on a regular basis, maybe even after every call, but had gotten lazy about three hours ago, which was certainly consistent with his demeanour and his reaction time. I guessed the number the calls had come in from represented some kind of an organizer or dispatcher. Maybe even the big boss himself. If it had been a cell phone number, it would have been no good to me. No good at all. Cell phones can be anywhere. That’s the point of cell phones.
But it wasn’t a cell phone number. It was a 212 number.
A Manhattan land line.
Which would have a fixed location. That’s the nature of land lines.
The best method of working backward from a phone number depends on how high up the food chain you are. Cops and private eyes have reverse telephone directories. Look up the number, get a name, get an address. The FBI has all kinds of sophisticated databases. The same kind of thing, but more expensive. The CIA probably owns the phone companies.
I don’t have any of that stuff. So I take the low-tech approach.
I dial the number and see who answers.
I hit the green button and the phone brought up the number for me. I hit the green button again and the phone started dialling. There was ring tone. It cut off fairly fast and a woman’s voice said, ‘This is the Four Seasons, and how may I help you?’
I said, ‘The hotel?’
‘Yes, and how may I direct your call?’
I said, ‘I’m sorry, I have the wrong number.’
I clicked off.
The Four Seasons Hotel. I had seen it. I had never been in it. It was a little above my current pay grade. It was on 57th Street between Madison Avenue and Park Avenue. Right there in my sixty-eight square-block box, a little west and a lot north of its geographic centre. But a short walk for someone getting off the 6 train at 59th Street. I Hundreds of rooms, hundreds of telephone extensions, all routed out through the main switchboard, all carrying the main switchboard’s caller ID.
Helpful, but not very.
I thought for a moment and looked around very carefully and then reversed direction and headed for the 14th Precinct.
* * *
I had no idea what time an NYPD detective would show up for a night watch, but I expected Theresa Lee to be there within about an hour. I expected to have to wait for her in the downstairs lobby. What I didn’t expect was to find Jacob Mark already in there ahead of me. He was sitting on an upright chair against a wall and drumming his fingers on his knees. He looked up at me with no surprise at all and said, ‘Peter didn’t show up for practice.’
TWENTY-NINE
Right there in the Precinct lobby Jacob Mark talked for about five straight minutes, with the kind of rambling fluency that is typical of the truly anxious. He said that the USC football people had waited four hours and then called Peter’s father, who had called him. He said that for a star senior on a full scholarship to miss practice was completely unthinkable. In fact to make practice no matter what else was going on was a major part of the culture. Earthquakes, riots, wars, deaths in the family, mortal disease, everyone showed up. It emphasized to the world how important football was, and by implication how important the players were to the university. Because jocks were respected by most, but disrespected by some. And there was an unspoken mandate to live up to the majority’s ideals and change the minority’s minds. Then there were the straightforward machismo issues. To miss practice was like a firefighter declining a turn-out, like a hit-by-pitch batter rubbing his arm, like a gunslinger staying inside the saloon. Unthinkable. Unheard of. Doesn’t happen. Hangovers, broken bones, torn muscles, it didn’t matter. You showed up. Plus Peter was going to the NFL, and increasingly pro teams look for character. They’ve been burned too many times. So missing practice was the same thing as trashing his meal ticket. Inexplicable. Incomprehensible.
I listened without paying close attention. I was counting hours instead. Close to forty-eight since Susan Mark had missed her deadline. Why hadn’t Peter’s body been found?
Then Theresa Lee showed up with news.
* * *
But first Lee had to deal with Jacob Mark’s situation. She took us up to the second floor squad room and heard him out and asked, ‘Has Peter been officially reported missing?’
Jake said, ‘I want to do that right now.’
‘You can’t,’ Lee said. ‘At least, not to me. He’s missing in LA, not in New York.’
‘Susan was killed here.’
‘She committed suicide here.’
‘The USC people don’t take missing persons reports. And the LAPD won’t take it seriously. They don’t understand.’
‘Peter’s twenty-two years old. It’s not like he’s a child.’
‘He’s been missing more than five days.’
‘Duration isn’t significant. He doesn’t live at home. And who is to say he’s missing? Who is to say what his normal pattern might be? Presumably he goes for long periods without contact with his family.’
‘This is different.’
‘What’s your policy over there in Jersey?’
Jake didn’t answer.
Lee said, ‘He’s an independent adult. It’s like he got on a plane and went on vacation. It’s like his friends were at the airport and watched him go. I can see where the LAPD is coming from on this.’
‘But he missed football practice. That doesn’t happen.’
‘It just did, apparently.’
‘Susan was being threatened,’ Jake said.
‘By who?’
Jake looked at me. ‘Tell her, Reacher.’
I said, ‘Something to do with her job. There was a lot of leverage. Had to be. I think a threat against her son would be consistent.’
‘OK,’ Lee said. She looked around the squad room and found her partner, Docherty. He was working at one of a pair of twinned desks at the far end of the space. She looked back at Jake and said, ‘Go make a full report. Everything you know, and everything you think you know.’
Jake nodded gratefully and headed towards Docherty. I waited until he was gone and asked, ‘Are you reopening the file now?’
Lee said, ‘No. The file is closed and it’s staying closed. Because as it happens there’s nothing to worry about. But the guy’s a cop and we have to be courteous. And I want him out of the way for an hour.’
‘Why is there nothing to worry about?’
So she told me her news.
She said, ‘We know why Susan Mark came up here.’
‘How?’
‘We got a missing persons report,’ she said. ‘Apparently Susan was helping someone with an inquiry, and when she didn’t show, the individual concerned got worried and came in to report her missing.’
‘What kind of inquiry?’
‘Something personal, I think. I wasn’t here. The day guys said it all sounded innocent enough. And it must have been, really, or why else come to the police station?’
‘And Jacob Mark shouldn’t know this why?’
‘We need a lot more detail. And getting it will be easier without him there. He’s too involved. He’s a family member. He’ll scream and yell.
I’ve seen it before.’
‘Who was the individual concerned?’
‘A foreign national briefly here in town for the purpose of conducting the research that Susan was helping with.’
‘Wait,’ I said. ‘Briefly here in town? Staying in a hotel?’
‘Yes,’ Lee said.
‘The Four Seasons?’
‘Yes,’ Lee said.
‘What’s his name?’
‘It’s a her, not a him,’ Lee said. ‘Her name is Lila Hoth.’
THIRTY
It was very late in the evening but Lee called anyway and Lila Hoth agreed to meet with us at the Four Seasons, right away, no hesitation. We drove over in Lee’s unmarked car and parked in the hotel’s kerbside loading zone. The lobby was magnificent. All pale sandstone and brass and tan paint and golden marble, suspended halfway between dim intimacy and bright modernism. Lee showed her badge at the desk and the clerk called upstairs and then pointed us towards the elevators. We were headed for another high floor and the way the clerk had spoken made me feel that Lila Hoth’s room wasn’t going to be the smallest or the cheapest in the place.
In fact Lila Hoth’s room was another suite. It had a double door, like Sansom’s in North Carolina, but no cop outside. Just a quiet empty corridor. There were used room service trays here and there, and some of the doorknobs had Do Not Disturb signs or breakfast orders on them. Theresa Lee paused and double- checked the number and knocked. Nothing happened for a minute. Then the right-hand panel opened and we saw a woman standing inside the doorway, with soft yellow light directly behind her. She was easily sixty, maybe more, short and thick and heavy, with steel-grey hair cut plain and blunt. Dark eyes, lined and hooded. A white slab of a face, meaty, immobile, and bleak. A guarded, unreadable expression. She was wearing an ugly brown house dress made of thick man-made material.
Lee asked, ‘Ms Hoth?’
The woman ducked her head and blinked and moved her hands and made a kind of all-purpose apologetic sound. The universal dumb show for not understanding.
