Lee Child - [Jack Reacher 01-16]

by Jack Reacher Series (epub)

  She wrote it all down, and then clicked her way into the nationwide DMV database. Bad news again. UNSUB didn’t have a driver’s license. Which was very weird. And which was a very big pain in the butt. Because no driver’s license meant no current photograph and no current address listing. She clicked her way into the Veterans’Administration computer in Chicago. Searched by name, rank, and number. The inquiries came up blank. UNSUB wasn’t receiving federal benefits and hadn’t offered a forwarding address. Why not? Where the hell are you? She went back into Social Security and asked for contributions records. There weren’t any. UNSUB hadn’t been employed since leaving the military, at least not legally. She tried the IRS for confirmation. Same story. UNSUB hadn’t paid taxes in five years. Hadn’t even filed.

  OK, so let’s get serious. She hitched straighter in her chair and quit the government sites and fired up some illicit software that took her straight into the banking industry’s private world. Strictly speaking she shouldn’t be using it for this purpose. Or for any purpose. It was an obvious breach of official protocol. But she didn’t expect to get any comeback. And she did expect to get a result. If UNSUB had even a single bank account anywhere in the fifty states, it would show up. Even a humble little checking account. Even an empty or abandoned account. Plenty of people got by without bank accounts, she knew that, but she felt in her gut UNSUB wouldn’t be one of them. Not somebody who had been a U.S. Army major. With medals.

  She entered the Social Security number twice, once in the SSN field and once in the taxpayer ID field. She entered the name. She hit search.

  One hundred and eighty miles away, Jack Reacher shivered. Atlantic City in the middle of November wasn’t the warmest spot on earth. Not by any measure. The wind came in off the ocean carrying enough salt to keep everything permanently damp and clammy. It whipped and gusted and blew trash around and flattened his pants against his legs. Five days ago he had been in Los Angeles, and he was pretty sure he should have stayed there. Now he was pretty sure he should go back. Southern California was a very attractive place in November. The air was warm down there, and the ocean breezes were soft balmy caresses instead of endless lashing fusillades of stinging salt cold. He should go back there. He should go somewhere, that was for damn sure.

  Or maybe he should stick around like he’d been asked to, and buy a coat.

  He had come back east with an old black woman and her brother. He had been hitching rides east out of L.A. in order to take a one-day look at the Mojave Desert. The old couple had picked him up in an ancient Buick Roadmaster. He saw a microphone and a primitive PA system and a boxed Yamaha keyboard among the suitcases in the load space and the old lady told him she was a singer heading for a short residency all the way over in Atlantic City. Told him her brother accompanied her on the keyboard and drove the car, but he wasn’t much of a talker anymore, and he wasn’t much of a driver anymore, and the Roadmaster wasn’t much of a car anymore. It was all true. The old guy was completely silent and they were all in mortal danger several times inside the first five miles. The old lady started singing to calm herself. She gave it a few bars of Dawn Penn’s “You Don’t Love Me” and Reacher immediately decided to go all the way east with her just to hear more. He offered to take over the driving chores. She kept on singing. She had the kind of sweet smoky voice that should have made her a blues superstar long ago, except she was probably in the wrong place too many times and it had never happened for her. The old car had failed power steering to wrestle with and all kinds of ticks and rattles and whines under the hammer-heavy V-8 beat, and at about fifty miles an hour the noises all came together and sounded like a backing track. The radio was weak and picked up an endless succession of local AM stations for about twenty minutes each. The old woman sang along with them and the old guy kept completely quiet and slept most of the way on the backseat. Reacher drove eighteen hours a day for three solid days, and arrived in New Jersey feeling like he’d been on vacation.

  The residency was at a fifth-rate lounge eight blocks from the boardwalk, and the manager wasn’t the kind of guy you would necessarily trust to respect a contract. So Reacher made it his business to count the customers and keep a running total of the cash that should show up in the pay envelope at the end of the week. He made it very obvious and watched the manager grow more and more resentful about it. The guy took to making short cryptic phone calls with his hand shielding the receiver and his eyes locked on Reacher’s face. Reacher looked straight back at him with a wintry smile and an unblinking gaze and stayed put. He sat through all three sets two weekend nights running, but then he started to get restless. And cold. The Mamas and the Papas were in his head: I’d be safe and warm, if I was in L.A. So on the Monday morning he was about to change his mind and get back on the road when the old keyboard player walked him back from breakfast and finally broke his silence.

  “I want to ask you to stick around,” he said. He pronounced it wanna ax, and there was some kind of hope in the rheumy old eyes. Reacher didn’t answer.

  “You don’t stick around, that manager’s going to stiff us for sure,” the old guy said, like getting stiffed for money was something that just happened to musicians, like flat tires and head colds. “But we get paid, we got gas money to head up to New York, maybe get us a gig from B. B. King in Times Square, resurrect our careers. Guy like you could make a big difference in that department, count on it.”

  Reacher said nothing.

  “Of course, I can see you being worried,” the old guy said. “Management like that, bound to be some unsavory characters lurking in the background.”

  Reacher smiled at the subtlety.

  “What are you, anyway?” the old guy asked. “Some kind of a boxer?”

  “No,” Reacher said. “No kind of a boxer.”

  “Wrestler?” the old guy asked. He said it wrassler. “Like on cable television?”

  “No.”

  “You’re big enough, that’s for damn sure,” the old guy said. “Plenty big enough to help us out, if you wanted to.”

  He said it he’p. No front teeth. Reacher said nothing.

  “What are you, anyway?” the old guy asked again.

  “I was a military cop,” Reacher said. “In the Army, thirteen years.”

  “You quit?”

  “As near as makes no difference.”

  “No jobs for you folks afterward?”

  “None that I want,” Reacher said.

  “You live in L.A.?”

  “I don’t live anywhere,” Reacher said. “I move around.”

  “So road folk should stick together,” the old guy said. “Simple as that. Help each other. Keep it a mutual thing.”

  He’p each other.

  “It’s very cold here,” Reacher said.

  “That’s for damn sure,” the old guy said. “But you could buy a coat.”

  So he was on a windswept corner with the sea gale flattening his pants against his legs, making a final decision. The highway, or a coat store? He ran a brief fantasy through his head, La Jolla maybe, a cheap room, warm nights, bright stars, cold beer. Then: the old woman at B. B. King’s new club in New York, some retro-obsessed young A&R man stops by, gives her a contract, she makes a CD, she gets a national tour, a sidebar in Rolling Stone, fame, money, a new house. A new car. He turned his back on the highway and hunched against the wind and walked east in search of a clothing store.

  On that particular Monday there were nearly twelve thousand FDIC-insured banking organizations licensed and operating inside the United States and between them they carried over a thousand million separate accounts, but only one of them was listed against UNSUB’s name and Social Security number. It was a simple checking account held at a branch of a regional bank in Arlington, Virginia. M. E. Froelich stared at the branch’s business address in surprise. That’s less than four miles from where I’m sitting right now. She copied the details onto her yellow paper. Picked up her phone and called a senior colleague on the other side of t
he organization and asked him to contact the bank in question for all the details he could get. Especially a home address. She asked him to be absolutely as fast as possible, but discreet, too. And completely off the record. Then she hung up and waited, anxious and frustrated about being temporarily hands-off. Problem was, the other side of the organization could ask banks discreet questions quite easily, whereas for Froelich to do so herself would be regarded as very odd indeed.

  Reacher found a discount store three blocks nearer the ocean and ducked inside. It was narrow but ran back into the building a couple of hundred feet. There were fluorescent tubes all over the ceiling and racks of garments stretching as far as the eye could see. Seemed to be women’s stuff on the left, children’s in the center, and men’s on the right. He started in the far back corner and worked forward.

  There were all kinds of coats commercially available, that was for damn sure. The first two rails had short padded jackets. No good. He went by something an old Army buddy had told him: a good coat is like a good lawyer. It covers your ass. The third rail was more promising. It had neutral-colored thigh-length canvas coats made bulky by thick flannel linings. Maybe there was some wool in there. Maybe some other stuff, too. They certainly felt heavy enough.

  “Can I help you?”

  He turned around and saw a young woman standing right behind him.

  “Are these coats good for the weather up here?” he asked.

  “They’re perfect,” the woman said. She was very animated. She told him all about some kind of special stuff sprayed on the canvas to repel moisture. She told him all about the insulation inside. She promised it would keep him warm right down to a subzero temperature. He ran his hand down the rail and pulled out a dark olive XXL.

  “OK, I’ll take this one,” he said.

  “You don’t want to try it on?”

  He paused and then shrugged into it. It fit pretty well. Nearly. Maybe it was a little tight across the shoulders. The sleeves were maybe an inch too short.

  “You need the 3XLT,” the woman said. “What are you, a fifty?”

  “A fifty what?”

  “Chest.”

  “No idea. I never measured it.”

  “Height about six-five?”

  “I guess,” he said.

  “Weight?”

  “Two-forty,” he said. “Maybe two-fifty.”

  “So you definitely need the big-and-tall fitting,” she said. “Try the 3XLT.”

  The 3XLT she handed him was the same dull color as the XXL he had picked. It fit much better. A little roomy, which he liked. And the sleeves were right.

  “You OK for pants?” the woman called. She had ducked away to another rail and was flicking through heavy canvas work pants, glancing at his waist and the length of his legs. She came out with a pair that matched one of the colors in the flannel lining inside the coat. “And try these shirts,” she said. She jumped over to another rail and showed him a rainbow of flannel shirts. “Put a T-shirt underneath it and you’re all set. Which color do you like?”

  “Something dull,” he said.

  She laid everything out on top of one of the rails. The coat, the pants, the shirt, a T-shirt. They looked pretty good together, muddy olives and khakis.

  “OK?” she said brightly.

  “OK,” he said. “You got underwear too?”

  “Over here,” she said.

  He rooted through a bin of reject-quality boxers and selected a pair in white. Then a pair of socks, mostly cotton, flecked with all kinds of organic colors.

  “OK?” the woman said again. He nodded and she led him to the register at the front of the store and bleeped all the tags under the little red light.

  “One hundred and eighty-nine dollars even,” she said.

  He stared at the red figures on the register’s display.

  “I thought this was a discount store,” he said.

  “That’s incredibly reasonable, really,” she said. He shook his head and dug into his pocket and came out with a wad of crumpled bills. Counted out a hundred and ninety. The dollar change she gave him left him with four bucks in his hand.

  The senior colleague from the other side of the organization called Froelich back within twenty-five minutes.

  “You get a home address?” she asked him.

  “One hundred Washington Boulevard,” the guy said. “Arlington, Virginia. Zip code is 20310-1500.”

  Froelich wrote it down. “OK, thanks. I guess that’s all I need.”

  “I think you might need a little more.”

  “Why?”

  “You know Washington Boulevard?”

  Froelich paused. “Runs up to the Memorial Bridge, right?”

  “It’s just a highway.”

  “No buildings? Got to be buildings.”

  “There is one building. Pretty big one. Couple hundred yards off the east shoulder.”

  “What?”

  “The Pentagon,” the guy said. “This is a phony address, Froelich. One side of Washington Boulevard is Arlington Cemetery and the other side is the Pentagon. That’s it. Nothing else. There’s no number one hundred. There are no private mailing addresses at all. I checked with the Postal Service. And that zip code is the Department of the Army, inside the Pentagon.”

  “Great,” Froelich said. “You tell the bank?”

  “Of course not. You told me to be discreet.”

  “Thanks. But I’m back at square one.”

  “Maybe not. This is a bizarre account, Froelich. Six-figure balance, but it’s all just stuck in checking, earning nothing. And the customer accesses it via Western Union only. Never comes in. It’s a phone arrangement. Customer calls in with a password, the bank wires cash through Western Union, wherever.”

  “No ATM card?”

  “No cards at all. No checkbook was ever issued, either.”

  “Western Union only? I never heard of that before. Are there any records?”

  “Geographically, all over the place, literally. Forty states and counting in five years. Occasional deposits and plenty of nickel-and-dime withdrawals, all of them to Western Union offices in the boonies, in the cities, everywhere.”

  “Bizarre.”

  “Like I said.”

  “Anything you can do?”

  “Already done it. They’re going to call me next time the customer calls them.”

  “And then you’re going to call me?”

  “I might.”

  “Is there a frequency pattern?”

  “It varies. Maximum interval recently has been a few weeks. Sometimes it’s every few days. Mondays are popular. Banks are closed on the weekend.”

  “So I could get lucky today.”

  “Sure you could,” the guy said. “Question is, am I going to get lucky too?”

  “Not that lucky,” Froelich said.

  The lounge manager watched Reacher step into his motel lobby. Then he ducked back into a windy side street and fired up his cell phone. Cupped his hand around it and spoke low and urgently, and convincingly, but respectfully, as was required.

  “Because he’s dissing me,” he said, in answer to a question.

  “Today would be good,” he said, in answer to another.

  “Two at least,” he said, in answer to the final question. “This is a big guy.”

  Reacher changed one of his four dollars for quarters at the motel desk and headed for the pay phone. Dialed his bank from memory and gave his password and arranged for five hundred bucks to be wired to Western Union in Atlantic City by close of business. Then he went to his room and bit off all the tags and put his new clothes on. Transferred all his pocket junk across and threw his summer gear in the trash and looked himself over in the long mirror behind the closet door. Grow a beard and get some sunglasses and I could walk all the way to the North Pole, he thought.

  Froelich heard about the proposed wire transfer eleven minutes later. Closed her eyes for a second and clenched her hands in triumph and then reached behind her and pu
lled a map of the Eastern Seaboard off a shelf. Maybe three hours if the traffic cooperates. I might just make it. She grabbed her jacket and her purse and ran down to the garage.

  Reacher wasted an hour in his room and then went out to test the insulating properties of his new coat. Field trial, they used to call it, way back when. He headed east toward the ocean, into the wind. Felt rather than saw somebody behind him. Just a characteristic little burr down in the small of his back. He slowed up and used a store window for a mirror. Caught a glimpse of movement fifty yards back. Too far away for details.