Lee Child - [Jack Reacher 01-16]

by Jack Reacher Series (epub)

  “They didn’t stay long.”

  I nodded. “Which means they weren’t very suspicious. They were being cautious, that’s all. Maybe they had some small thing on their minds, but they didn’t really believe it. They came up here to rule it out.”

  “What kind of thing?”

  “Information,” I said. “That’s all the Human Resources Command has got.”

  “They thought she was passing information?”

  “They wanted to rule it out.”

  “Which means at some point they must have ruled it in.”

  I nodded again. “Maybe she was seen in the wrong office, opening the wrong file cabinet. Maybe they figured there was an innocent explanation, but they wanted to be sure. Or maybe something went missing and they didn’t know who to watch, so they were watching them all.”

  “What kind of information?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “Like a copied file?”

  “Smaller,” I said. “A folded note, a computer memory. Something that could be passed from hand to hand in a subway car.”

  “She was a patriot. She loved her country. She wouldn’t do that.”

  “And she didn’t do that. She didn’t pass anything to anyone.”

  “So we’ve got nothing.”

  “We’ve got your sister hundreds of miles from home with a loaded gun.”

  “And afraid,” Jake said.

  “Wearing a winter jacket in ninety-degree weather.”

  “With two names floating around,” he said. “John Sansom and Lila Hoth, whoever the hell she is. And Hoth sounds foreign.”

  “So did Markakis, once upon a time.”

  He went quiet again and I sipped coffee. Traffic was getting slower on Eighth. The morning rush was building. The sun was up, a little south of east. Its rays were not aligned with the street grid. They came in at a low angle and threw long diagonal shadows.

  Jake said, “Give me somewhere to start.”

  I said, “We don’t know enough.”

  “Speculate.”

  “I can’t. I could make up a story, but it would be full of holes. And it might be completely the wrong story to begin with.”

  “Try it. Give me something. Like brainstorming.”

  I shrugged. “You ever met any ex–Special Forces guys?”

  “Two or three. Maybe four or five, counting the Troopers I knew.”

  “You probably didn’t. Most Special Forces careers never happened. It’s like people who claim to have been at Woodstock. Believe them all, the crowd must have been ten million strong. Or like New Yorkers who saw the planes hit the towers. They all did, to listen to them. No one was looking the wrong way at the time. People who say they were Special Forces are usually bullshitting. Most of them never made it out of the infantry. Some of them were never in the army at all. People dress things up.”

  “Like my sister.”

  “It’s human nature.”

  “What’s your point?”

  “I’m working with what we’ve got. We’ve got two random names, and election season starting up, and your sister in HRC.”

  “You think John Sansom is lying about his past?”

  “Probably not,” I said. “But it’s a common area of exaggeration. And politics is a dirty business. You can bet that right now someone is checking on the guy who did Sansom’s dry cleaning twenty years ago, wanting to know if he had a green card. So it’s a no-brainer to assume that people are fact-checking his actual biography. It’s a national sport.”

  “So maybe Lila Hoth is a journalist. Or a researcher. Cable news, or something. Or talk radio.”

  “Maybe she’s Sansom’s opponent.”

  “Not with a name like that. Not in North Carolina.”

  “OK, let’s say she’s a journalist or a researcher. Maybe she put the squeeze on an HRC clerk for Sansom’s service record. Maybe she picked your sister.”

  “Where was her leverage?”

  I said, “That’s the first big hole in the story.” Which it was. Susan Mark had been desperate and terrified. It was hard to imagine a journalist finding that kind of leverage. Journalists can be manipulative and persuasive, but no one is particularly afraid of them.

  “Was Susan political?” I asked.

  “Why?”

  “Maybe she didn’t like Sansom. Didn’t like what he stood for. Maybe she was cooperating. Or volunteering.”

  “Then why would she be so scared?”

  “Because she was breaking the law,” I said. “Her heart would have been in her mouth.”

  “And why was she carrying the gun?”

  “Didn’t she normally carry it?”

  “Never. It was an heirloom. She kept it in her sock drawer, like people do.”

  I shrugged. The gun was the second big hole in the story. People take their guns out of their sock drawers for a variety of reasons. Protection, aggression. But never just in case they feel a spur-of-the-moment impulse to off themselves far from home.

  Jake said, “Susan wasn’t very political.”

  “OK.”

  “Therefore there can’t be a connection with Sansom.”

  “Then why did his name come up?”

  “I don’t know.”

  I said, “Susan must have driven up. Can’t take a gun on a plane. Her car is probably getting towed right now. She must have come through the Holland Tunnel and parked way downtown.”

  Jake didn’t reply. My coffee was cold. The waitress had given up on refills. We were an unprofitable table. The rest of the clientele had changed twice over. Working people, moving fast, fueling up, getting ready for a busy day. I pictured Susan Mark twelve hours earlier, getting ready for a busy night. Dressing. Finding her father’s gun, loading it, packing it into the black bag. Climbing into her car, taking 236 to the Beltway, going clockwise, maybe getting gas, hitting 95, heading north, eyes wide and desperate, drilling the darkness ahead.

  Speculate, Jake had said. But suddenly I didn’t want to. Because I could hear Theresa Lee in my head. The detective. You tipped her over the edge. Jake saw me thinking and asked, “What?”

  “Let’s assume the leverage,” I said. “Let’s assume it was totally compelling. So let’s assume Susan was on her way to deliver whatever information she was told to get. And let’s assume these were bad people. She didn’t trust them to release whatever hold they had over her. Probably she thought they were going to up the stakes and ask for more. She was in, and she didn’t see a way of getting out. And, above all, she was very afraid of them. So she was desperate. So she took the gun. Possibly she thought she could fight her way out, but she wasn’t optimistic about her chances. All in all, she didn’t think things were going to end well.”

  “So?”

  “She had business to attend to. She was almost there. She never intended to shoot herself.”

  “But what about the list? The behaviors?”

  “Same difference,” I said. “She was on the way to where she expected someone else to end her life, maybe some other way, either literally or figuratively.”

  Chapter 14

  Jacob Mark said, “It doesn’t explain the coat.” But I thought he was wrong. I thought it explained the coat pretty well. And it explained the fact that she parked downtown and rode up on the subway. I figured she was looking to come upon whoever she was meeting from an unexpected angle, out of a hole in the ground, armed, dressed all in black, ready for some conflict in the dark. Maybe the winter parka was the only black coat she owned.

  And it explained everything else, too. The dread, the sense of doom. Maybe the mumbling had been her way of rehearsing pleas, or exculpations, or arguments, or maybe even threats. Maybe repeating them over and over again had made them more convincing to her. More plausible. More reassuring.

  Jake said, “She can’t have been on her way to deliver something, because she didn’t have anything with her.”

  “She might have had something,” I said. “In her head. You told me she
had a great memory. Units, dates, time lines, whatever they needed.”

  He paused, and tried to find a reason to disagree.

  He failed.

  “Classified information,” he said. “Army secrets. Jesus, I can’t believe it.”

  “She was under pressure, Jake.”

  “What kind of secrets does a personnel department have anyway, that are worth getting killed for?”

  I didn’t answer. Because I had no idea. In my day HRC had been called PERSCOM. Personnel Command, not Human Resources Command. I had served thirteen years without ever thinking about it. Not even once. Paperwork and records. All the interesting information had been somewhere else.

  Jake moved in his seat. He ran his fingers through his unwashed hair and clamped his palms on his ears and moved his head through a complete oval, like he was easing stiffness in his neck, or acting out some kind of inner turmoil that was bringing him full circle, back to his most basic question.

  He said, “So why? Why did she just up and kill herself before she got where she was going?”

  I paused a beat. Café noises went on all around us. The squeak of sneakers on linoleum, the clink and scrape of crockery, the sound of TV news from sets high on the walls, the ding of the short-order bell.

  “She was breaking the law,” I said. “She was in breach of all kinds of trusts and professional obligations. And she must have suspected some kind of surveillance. Maybe she had even been warned. So she was tense, right from the moment she got in her car. All the way up she was watching for red lights in her mirror. Every cop at every toll was a potential danger. Every guy she saw in a suit could have been a federal agent. And on the train, any one of us could have been getting ready to bust her.”

  Jake didn’t reply.

  I said, “And then I approached her.”

  “And?”

  “She flipped. She thought I was about to arrest her. Right then and there, the game was over. She was at the end of the road. She was damned if she did, and damned if she didn’t. She couldn’t go forward, couldn’t go back. She was trapped. Whatever threats they were using against her were going to come to pass, and she was going to jail.”

  “Why would she think you were going to arrest her?”

  “She must have thought I was a cop.”

  “Why would she think you were a cop?”

  I’m a cop, I had said. I can help you. We can talk.

  “She was paranoid,” I said. “Understandably.”

  “You don’t look like a cop. You look like a bum. She would more likely have thought you were hustling her for spare change.”

  “Maybe she thought I was undercover.”

  “She was a records clerk, according to you. She wouldn’t have known what undercover cops look like.”

  “Jake, I’m sorry, but I told her I was a cop.”

  “Why?”

  “I thought she was a bomber. I was just trying to get through the next three seconds without her pushing the button. I was ready to say anything.”

  He asked, “What exactly did you say?” So I told him, and he said, “Jesus, that even sounds like Internal Affairs bullshit.”

  I think you tipped her over the edge.

  “I’m sorry,” I said again.

  For the next few minutes I was getting it from all sides. Jacob Mark was glaring at me because I had killed his sister. The waitress was angry because she could have sold about eight breakfasts in the time we had lingered over two cups of coffee. I took out a twenty-dollar bill and trapped it under my saucer. She saw me do it. Eight breakfasts’ worth of tips, right there. That solved the waitress problem. The Jacob Mark problem was tougher. He was still and silent and bristling. I saw him glance away, twice. Getting ready to disengage. Eventually he said, “I got to go. I got things to do. I have to find a way to tell her family.”

  I said, “Family?”

  “Molina, the ex–husband. And they have a son, Peter. My nephew.”

  “Susan had a son?”

  “What’s it to you?”

  The IQ of labradors.

  I said, “Jake, we’ve been sitting here talking about leverage, and you didn’t think to mention that Susan had a kid?”

  He went blank for a second. Said, “He’s not a kid. He’s twenty-two years old. He’s a senior at USC. He plays football. He’s bigger than you are. And he’s not close with his mother. He lived with his father after the divorce.”

  I said, “Call him.”

  “It’s four o’clock in the morning in California.”

  “Call him now.”

  “I’ll wake him up.”

  “I sure hope you will.”

  “He needs to be prepared for this.”

  “First he needs to be answering his phone.”

  So Jake took out his cell again and beeped through his address book and hit the green button against a name pretty low down on the list. Alphabetical order, I guessed. P for Peter. Jake held the phone against his ear and looked one kind of worried through the first five rings, and then another kind after the sixth. He kept the phone up a little while longer and then lowered it slowly and said, “Voice mail.”

  Chapter 15

  I said, “Go to work. Call the LAPD or the USC campus cops and ask for some favors, blue to blue. Get someone to head over and check whether he’s home.”

  “They’ll laugh at me. It’s a college jock not answering his phone at four in the morning.”

  I said, “Just do it.”

  Jake said, “Come with me.”

  I shook my head. “I’m staying here. I want to talk to those private guys again.”

  “You’ll never find them.”

  “They’ll find me. I never answered their question, about whether Susan gave me anything. I think they’ll want to ask it again.”

  We arranged to meet in five hours’ time, in the same coffee shop. I watched him get back in his car and then I walked south on Eighth, slowly, like I had nowhere special to go, which I didn’t. I was tired from not sleeping much but wired from all the coffee, so overall I figured it was a wash in terms of alertness and energy. And I figured the private guys would be in the same boat. We had all been up all night. Which fact got me thinking about time. Just as two in the morning was the wrong time for a suicide bombing, it was also a weird time for Susan Mark to be heading for a rendezvous and delivering information. So I stood for a spell at the newspaper rack outside a deli and leafed through the tabloids. I found what I was half-expecting buried deep inside the Daily News. The New Jersey Turnpike had been closed northbound for four hours the previous evening. A tanker wreck, in fog. An acid spill. Multiple fatalities.

  I pictured Susan Mark trapped on the road between exits. A four-hour jam. A four-hour delay. Disbelief. Mounting tension. No way forward, no way back. A rock and a hard place. Time, ticking away. A deadline, approaching. A deadline, missed. Threats and sanctions and penalties, now presumed live and operational. The 6 train had seemed fast to me. It must have felt awful slow to her. You tipped her over the edge. Maybe so, but she hadn’t needed a whole lot of tipping.

  I butted the newspapers back into saleable condition and set off strolling again. I figured the guy with the torn jacket would have gone home to change, but the other three would be close by. They would have watched me enter the coffee shop, and they would have picked me up when I came out. I couldn’t see them on the street, but I wasn’t really looking for them. No point in looking for something when you know for sure it’s there.

  Back in the day Eighth Avenue had been a dangerous thoroughfare. Broken streetlights, vacant lots, shuttered stores, crack, hookers, muggers. I had seen all kinds of things there. I had never been attacked personally. Which was no big surprise. To make me a potential victim, the world’s population would have to be reduced all the way down to two. Me and a mugger, and I would have won. Now Eighth was as safe as anywhere else. It bustled with commercial activity and there were people all over the place. So I didn’t care exactly where the thre
e guys approached me. I made no attempt to channel them to a place of my choosing. I just walked. Their call. The day was on its way from warm to hot and sidewalk smells were rising up all around me, like a crude calendar: Garbage stinks in the summer and doesn’t in the winter.

  * * *

  They approached me a block south of Madison Square Garden and the big old post office. Construction on a corner lot shunted pedestrians along a narrow fenced-off lane in the gutter. I got a yard into it and one guy stepped ahead of me and one fell in behind and the leader came alongside me. Neat moves. The leader said, “We’re prepared to forget the thing with the coat.”

  “That’s good,” I said. “Because I already did.”

  “But we need to know if you have something that belongs to us.”

  “To you?”

  “To our principal.”

  “Who are you guys?”

  “I gave you our card.”

  “And at first I was very impressed by it. It looked like a work of art, arithmetically. There are more than three million possible combinations for a seven-digit phone number. But you didn’t choose randomly. You picked one you knew was disconnected. I imagined that’s tough to do. So I was impressed. But then I figured in fact that’s impossible to do, given Manhattan’s population. Someone dies or moves away, their number gets recycled pretty fast. So then I guessed you had access to a list of numbers that never work. Phone companies keep a few, for when a number shows up in the movies or on TV. Can’t use real numbers for that, because customers might get harassed. So then I guessed you know people in the movie and TV business. Probably because most of the week you rent out as sidewalk security when there’s a show in town. Therefore the closest you get to action is fending off autograph hunters. Which must be a disappointment to guys like you. I’m sure you had something better in mind when you set up in business. And worse, it implies a certain erosion of abilities, through lack of practice. So now I’m even less worried about you than I was before. So all in all I’d say the card was a mistake, in terms of image management.”

  The guy said, “Can we buy you a cup of coffee?”