Lee Child - [Jack Reacher 01-16]

by Jack Reacher Series (epub)

  “In the glass tower you can see from the window.”

  “OK,” Reacher said. “I guess I could drop by.”

  “I still need whatever information you have,” Rodin said.

  Reacher shook his head.

  “No,” he said. “You really don’t.”

  He returned his visitor pass to the woman at the reception desk and headed back to the public plaza. Stood in the cold sun and turned a complete circle, getting a sense of the place. All cities are the same, and all cities are different. They all have colors. Some are gray. This one was brown. Reacher guessed the brick was made from local clay and had carried the color of old farmland into the facades. Even the stone was flecked with tan, like it carried deposits of iron. There were accents of dark red here and there, like old barns. It was a warm place, not busy, but it was surviving. It would rebound after the tragedy. There was progress and optimism and dynamism. All the new construction proved it. There were work zones and raw concrete curbs everywhere. Lots of planning, lots of rebuilding. Lots of hope.

  The new parking garage extension anchored the north end of the downtown strip. It suggested commercial expansion. It was south and slightly west of the kill zone. Very close. Directly west and maybe twice as distant was a length of the raised highway. It ran free and clear through a curve for maybe thirty yards before curling in behind the library. Then it curled some more and passed behind the black glass tower. The tower was due north of the plaza. It had an NBC sign near the door, on a black granite slab. Ann Yanni’s workplace, Reacher guessed, as well as Rodin’s daughter’s. East of the plaza was the office building with the DMV and the recruiting office. That was where the victims had come from. They had spilled out the door. What had Ann Yanni said? At the end of a long workweek? They had hustled west across the plaza toward their parked cars or the bus depot and had stumbled into a nightmare. The narrow walkway would have slowed them down and lined them up. Like shooting fish in a barrel.

  Reacher walked the length of the empty ornamental pool to the revolving door at the base of the tower. He went in and checked the lobby for a directory. There was a glassed-in board made of ridged black felt with press-in white letters. NBC was on the second floor. Some of the other suites were empty, and Reacher guessed the rest changed hands fast enough to make it worth holding on to the press-in letter system. Law Offices of Helen Rodin was listed on four. The letters were a little misaligned and the spacing was off. Rockefeller Center it ain’t, Reacher thought.

  He waited for the elevator in a queue of two, him and a pretty blonde woman. He looked at her and she looked at him. She got out on two and he realized it was Ann Yanni. He recognized her from the broadcast. Then he figured all he needed to do was meet Emerson from the local PD and he would have brought the whole breaking-news tableau to life.

  He found Helen Rodin’s suite. It was at the front of the building. Her windows were going to overlook the plaza. He knocked. Heard a muffled reply and went in. There was an empty reception room with a secretary’s desk. The desk was unoccupied. It was secondhand, but not recently used. No secretary yet, Reacher thought. Early days.

  He knocked on the inner office door. Heard the same voice make a second reply. He went in and found Helen Rodin at another secondhand desk. He recognized her from her father’s photograph. But face-to-face she looked even better. She was probably no more than thirty, quite tall, lightly built. Slim, in an athletic sort of a way. Not anorexic. Either she ran or played soccer or had been very lucky with her metabolism. She had long blonde hair and her father’s blue eyes. There was intelligence behind them. She was dressed all in black, in a pantsuit with a tight stretch top under the coat. Lycra, Reacher thought. Can’t beat it.

  “Hello,” she said.

  “I’m Jack Reacher,” he said.

  She stared at him. “You’re kidding. Are you really?”

  He nodded. “Always have been, always will be.”

  “Unbelievable.”

  “Not really. Everybody’s somebody.”

  “I mean, how did you know to come? We couldn’t find you.”

  “I saw it on the TV. Ann Yanni, Saturday morning.”

  “Well, thank God for TV,” she said. “And thank God you’re here.”

  “I was in Miami,” he said. “With a dancer.”

  “A dancer?”

  “She was Norwegian,” he said.

  He walked to the window and looked out. He was four stories up and the main shopping street ran away directly south, down a hill, emphasizing his elevation. The ornamental pool was placed with its long axis exactly lined up with the street. The pool was on the street, really, except they had blocked the street off to make the plaza. Someone returning from a long spell away would be surprised to find a big tank of water where once there had been roadway. The pool was much longer and narrower than it had looked from ground level. It looked sad and empty, with just a thin layer of mud and scum on the black tile. Beyond it and slightly to the right was the new parking structure. It was slightly downhill from the plaza. Maybe half a story’s difference.

  “Were you here?” Reacher asked. “When it happened?”

  “Yes, I was,” Helen Rodin said quietly.

  “Did you see it?”

  “Not at first. I heard the first three gunshots. They came very fast. The first, and then a tiny pause, and then the next two. Then another pause, a little longer, but just a split second, really. I stood up in time for the last three. Horrible.”

  Reacher nodded. Brave girl, he thought. She hears gunshots, and she stands up. She doesn’t dive under the desk. Then he thought: The first, and then a tiny pause. That was the sound of a skilled rifleman watching where his first cold shot went. So many variables. The cold barrel, the range, the wind, the zeroing, the sighting-in.

  “Did you see people die?” he asked.

  “Two of them,” she said behind him. “It was awful.”

  “Three shots and two people?”

  “He missed once. Either the fourth or the fifth shot, they’re not sure. They found the bullet in the pool. That’s why it’s empty. They drained it.”

  Reacher said nothing.

  “The bullet is part of the evidence,” Helen said. “It ties the rifle to the crime.”

  “Did you know any of the dead people?”

  “No. They were just people, I guess. In the wrong place at the wrong time.”

  Reacher said nothing.

  “I saw flames from the gun,” Helen said. “Way over there, in the shadows, in the dark. Little spits of flame.”

  “Muzzle flashes,” Reacher said.

  He turned back from the window. She held out her hand.

  “I’m Helen Rodin,” she said. “I’m sorry, I should have introduced myself properly.”

  Reacher took her hand. It was warm and firm.

  “Just Helen?” he said. “Not Helena Alekseyovna or something?”

  She stared at him again. “How the hell did you know that?”

  “I met your dad,” he said, and let go of her hand.

  “Did you?” she said. “Where?”

  “In his office, just now.”

  “You went to his office? Today?”

  “I just left there.”

  “Why did you go to his office? You’re my witness. He shouldn’t have seen you.”

  “He was very keen to talk.”

  “What did you tell him?”

  “Nothing. I asked questions instead.”

  “What questions?”

  “I wanted to know how strong his case was. Against James Barr.”

  “I’m representing James Barr. And you’re a defense witness. You should have been talking to me, not him.”

  Reacher said nothing.

  “Unfortunately the case against James Barr is very strong,” she said.

  “How did you get my name?” Reacher asked.

  “From James Barr, of course,” she said. “How else?”

  “From Barr? I don’t believe it.
”

  “Well, listen,” she said.

  She turned away to the desk and pressed a key on an old-fashioned cassette player. Reacher heard a voice he didn’t recognize say: Denying it is not an option. Helen touched the Pause key and kept her finger on it.

  “His first lawyer,” she said. “We changed representation yesterday.”

  “How? He was in a coma yesterday.”

  “Technically my client is James Barr’s sister. His next of kin.”

  Then she let go of the Pause key and Reacher heard room sounds and hiss and then a voice he hadn’t heard for fourteen years. It was exactly how he remembered it. It was low, and tense, and raspy. It was the voice of a man who rarely spoke. It said: Get Jack Reacher for me.

  He stood there, stunned.

  Helen Rodin pressed the Stop key.

  “See?” she said.

  Then she checked her watch.

  “Ten-thirty,” she said. “Stick around and join in the client conference.”

  She unveiled him like a conjurer on a stage. Like a rabbit out of a hat. First in was a guy Reacher immediately took for an ex-cop. He was introduced as Franklin, a freelance investigator who worked for lawyers. They shook hands.

  “You’re a hard man to find,” Franklin said.

  “Wrong,” Reacher said. “I’m an impossible man to find.”

  “Want to tell me why?” There were instant questions in Franklin’s eyes. A cop’s questions. Like, How much use is this guy going to be as a witness? What is he? A felon? A fugitive? Will he have credibility on the stand?

  “Just a hobby,” Reacher said. “Just a personal choice.”

  “So you’re cool?”

  “You could skate on me.”

  Then a woman came in. She was in her mid- to late thirties, probably, dressed for an office, and stressed and sleepless. But behind the agitation she wasn’t unappealing. She looked like a kind and decent person. Even pretty. But she was clearly James Barr’s sister. Reacher knew that even before they were introduced. She had the same coloring and a softer, feminized, older version of the same face.

  “I’m Rosemary Barr,” she said. “I’m so glad you found us. It feels providential. Now I really feel we’re getting somewhere.”

  Reacher said nothing at all.

  The law offices of Helen Rodin didn’t run to a conference room. Reacher figured that would come later. Maybe. If she prospered. So all four people crowded into the inner office. Helen sat at her desk. Franklin perched on a corner of it. Reacher leaned on the windowsill. Rosemary Barr paced, nervously. If there had been a rug, she would have worn holes in it.

  “OK,” Helen said. “Defense strategy. At the minimum we want to pursue a medical plea. But we’ll aim higher than that. How high we eventually get will depend on a number of factors. In which connection, first, I’m sure we all want to hear what Mr. Reacher has to say.”

  “I don’t think you do,” Reacher said.

  “Do what?”

  “Want to hear what I’ve got to say.”

  “Why wouldn’t we?”

  “Because you jumped to the wrong conclusion.”

  “Which is?”

  “Why do you think I went to see your father first?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Because I didn’t come here to help James Barr.”

  Nobody spoke.

  “I came here to bury him,” Reacher said.

  They all stared.

  “But why?” Rosemary Barr asked.

  “Because he’s done this before. And once was enough.”

  CHAPTER 3

  Reacher moved and propped his back against the window reveal and turned sideways so that he could see the plaza. And so that he couldn’t see his audience.

  “Is this a privileged conversation?” he asked.

  “Yes,” Helen Rodin said. “It is. It’s a client conference. It’s automatically protected. Nothing we say here can be repeated.”

  “Is it ethical for you to hear bad news, legally?”

  There was a long silence.

  “Are you going to give evidence for the prosecution?” Helen Rodin asked.

  “I don’t think I’ll have to, under the circumstances. But I will if necessary.”

  “Then we would hear the bad news anyway. We would take a deposition from you before the trial. To guarantee no more surprises.”

  More silence.

  “James Barr was a sniper,” Reacher said. “Not the best the army ever had, and not the worst. Just a good, competent rifleman. Average in almost every way.”

  Then he paused and turned his head and looked down to his left. At the cheap new building with the recruitment office in it. Army, Navy, Air Force, Marine Corps.

  “Four types of people join the military,” he said. “First, for people like me, it’s a family trade. Second, there are patriots, eager to serve their country. Third, there are people who just need a job. And fourth, there are people who want to kill other people. The military is the only place where it’s legal to do that. James Barr was the fourth type. Deep down he thought it would be fun to kill.”

  Rosemary Barr looked away. Nobody spoke.

  “But he never got the chance,” Reacher said. “I was a very thorough investigator when I was an MP, and I learned all about him. I studied him. He trained for five years. I went through his logbooks. Some weeks he fired two thousand rounds. All of them at paper targets or silhouettes. I counted a career total of nearly a quarter-million rounds fired, and not one of them at the enemy. He didn’t go to Panama in 1989. We had a very big army back then, and we required only a very small force, so most guys missed out. It burned him up. Then Desert Shield happened in 1990. He went to Saudi. But he wasn’t in Desert Storm in 1991. They made it a mostly armored campaign. James Barr sat it out in Saudi, cleaning sand out of his rifle, firing two thousand training rounds a week. Then after Desert Storm was over, they sent him to Kuwait City for the cleanup.”

  “What happened there?” Rosemary Barr asked.

  “He snapped,” Reacher said. “That’s what happened there. The Soviets had collapsed. Iraq was back in its box. He looked ahead and saw that war was over. He had trained nearly six years and had never fired his gun in anger and was never going to. A lot of his training had been about visualization. About seeing himself putting the reticle on the medulla oblongata, where the spinal cord broadens at the base of the brain. About breathing slow and squeezing the trigger. About the split-second pause while the bullet flies. About seeing the puff of pink mist from the back of the head. He had visualized all of that. Many times. But he had never seen it. Not once. He had never seen the pink mist. And he really wanted to.”

  Silence in the room.

  “So he went out one day, alone,” Reacher said. “In Kuwait City. He set up and waited. Then he shot and killed four people coming out of an apartment building.”

  Helen Rodin was staring at him.

  “He fired from a parking garage,” Reacher said. “Second level. It was directly opposite the apartment building’s door. The victims were American noncoms, as it happened. They had weekend passes, and they were in street clothes.”

  Rosemary Barr was shaking her head.

  “This can’t be true,” she said. “It just can’t be. He wouldn’t do it. And if he did, he’d have gone to prison. But he got an honorable discharge instead. Right after the Gulf. And a campaign medal. So it can’t have happened. It can’t possibly be true.”

  “That’s exactly why I’m here,” Reacher said. “There was a serious problem. Remember the sequence of events. We had four dead guys, and we worked from there. In the end I followed the trail all the way to your brother. But it was a very tough trail. We took all kinds of wrong turns. And along one of them we found stuff out about the four dead guys. Stuff we really didn’t want to know. Because they had been doing things they shouldn’t have been doing.”

  “What things?” Helen Rodin asked.

  “Kuwait City was a hell of a plac
e. Full of rich Arabs. Even the poor ones had Rolexes and Rolls-Royces and marble bathrooms with solid gold faucets. A lot of them had fled temporarily, for the duration. But they had left all their stuff behind. And some of them had left their families behind. Their wives and daughters.”

  “And?”

  “Our four dead noncoms had been doing the conquering army thing, just like the Iraqis before them. That’s how they saw it, I guess. We saw it as rape and armed robbery. As it happened they had left quite a trail that day, inside that building. And other buildings, on other days. We found enough loot in their footlockers to start another branch of Tiffany’s. Watches, diamonds, all kinds of portable stuff. And underwear. We figured they used the underwear to keep count of the wives and daughters.”

  “So what happened?”

  “It got political, inevitably. It went up the chain of command. The Gulf was supposed to be a big shiny success for us. It was supposed to be a hundred percent wonderful and a hundred percent squeaky clean. And the Kuwaitis were our allies, and so on and so forth. So ultimately we were told to cover for the four guys. We were told to bury the story. Which we did. Which also meant letting James Barr walk. Because whispers had gotten out and we knew his lawyer would have used them. We were afraid of blackmail. If we took Barr to trial, his lawyer would have countered with a justifiable homicide claim. He would have said Barr had been standing up for the honor of the army, in a rough-and-ready sort of a way. All the beans would have spilled in the process. We were told not to risk that. So our hands were tied. It was a stalemate.”

  “Maybe it was justifiable homicide,” Rosemary Barr said. “Maybe James really did know all along.”

  “Ma’am, he didn’t know. I’m very sorry, but he didn’t. He was never near any of those guys before. Didn’t know them from Adam. Didn’t say anything to me about them when I caught up to him. He hadn’t been in KC long. Not long enough to know anything. He was just killing people. For fun. He confessed to that, to me personally, before any of the other stuff ever came to light.”

  Silence in the room.

  “So we hushed it up and mustered him out,” Reacher said. “We said his four guys had been killed by Palestinians, which was plausible in Kuwait City in 1991. I was mildly pissed about the whole thing. It wasn’t the worst situation I had ever seen, but it wasn’t the nicest, either. James Barr got away with murder, by sheer luck. So I went to see him before he left and I told him to justify his great good fortune by never stepping out of line again, not ever, the whole rest of his life. I told him if he ever did, I would come find him and make him sorry.”