by Lee Child
“Watch out!” Jodie screamed.
The guy from the truck was still there at the driver’s window. Reacher was out in the traffic stream, but the traffic stream was slow and the guy was just running fast beside him, struggling to free something from his pocket. Reacher swerved left and came in parallel to a panel truck in the next lane. The guy was still running, skipping sideways, holding the door handle, coming out with something from his pocket. Reacher jammed left again and thumped him hard against the side of the truck. He heard a dull boom as the guy’s head hit the metal and then he was gone. The truck jammed to a panic stop and Reacher hauled left and got in front of it. Broadway was a solid mass of traffic. Ahead of him was a shimmering patchwork of metallic colors, sedan roofs winking in the sun, dodging left, dodging right, crawling forward, fumes rising, horns blasting. He hauled left again and turned and went through a crosswalk against the light, a crowd of jostling people skittering out of his way. The jeep was juddering and bouncing and pulling hard to the right. The temperature gauge was off the scale. Steam was boiling up through the gaps around the buckled hood. The collapsed airbag was hanging down to his knees. He jerked forward and hauled left again and jammed into an alley full of restaurant waste. Boxes, empty drums of cooking oil, rough wooden trays piled with spoiled vegetables. He buried the nose in a pile of cartons. They spilled down on the wrecked hood and bounced off the windshield. He killed the motor and pulled the keys.
He had put it too close to the wall for Jodie’s door to open. He grabbed her briefcase and her purse and threw them out through his door. Squeezed out after them and turned back for her. She was scrambling across the seats behind him. Her dress was riding up. He grabbed her around the waist and she ducked her head to his shoulder and he lifted her through the gap. She clung on hard, bare legs around his waist. He turned and ran her six feet away. She weighed nothing at all. He set her on her feet and ducked back for her bags. She was smoothing her dress over her thighs. Breathing hard. Damp hair all over the place.
“How did you know?” she gasped. “That it wasn’t an accident?”
He gave her the purse and carried the heavy briefcase himself. Led her by the hand back down the alley to the street, panting with adrenaline rush.
“Talk while we walk,” he said.
They turned left and headed east for Lafayette. The morning sun was in their eyes, the river breeze in their faces. Behind them, they could hear the traffic snarl on Broadway. They walked together fifty yards, breathing hard, calming down.
“How did you know?”
“Statistics, I guess. What were the chances we’d be in an accident on the exact same morning we figured there were guys out looking for us? Million to one, at best.”
She nodded. A slight smile on her face. Head up, shoulders back, recovering fast. No trace of shock. She was Leon’s daughter, that was for damn sure.
“You were great,” she said. “You reacted so fast.”
He shook his head as he walked.
“No, I was shit,” he said. “Dumb as hell. One mistake after another. They changed personnel. Some new guy in charge. I never even thought about that. I was figuring what the original pair of assholes might do, never even thought about them putting in somebody smarter. And whoever that guy was, he was pretty smart. It was a good plan, almost worked. I never saw it coming. Then when it happened, I still wasted a shitload of time talking to you about the damn airbags deploying.”
“Don’t feel bad,” she said.
“I do feel bad. Leon had a basic rule: Do it right. Thank God he wasn’t there to see that screwup. He’d have been ashamed of me.”
He saw her face cloud over. Realized what he’d said.
“I’m sorry. I just can’t make myself believe he’s dead.”
They came out on Lafayette. Jodie was at the curb, scanning for a cab.
“Well, he is,” she said, gently. “We’ll get used to it, I guess.”
He nodded. “And I’m sorry about your car. I should have seen it coming.”
She shrugged. “It’s only leased. I’ll get them to send another one just like it. Now I know it stands up in a collision, right? Maybe a red one.”
“You should report it stolen,” he said. “Call the cops and say it wasn’t there in the garage when you went for it this morning.”
“That’s fraud,” she said.
“No, that’s smart. Remember I can’t afford for the cops to be asking me questions about this. I don’t even carry a driver’s license.”
She thought about it. Then she smiled. Like a kid sister smiles when she’s forgiving her big brother for some kind of waywardness, he thought.
“OK,” she said. “I’ll call them from the office.”
“The office? You’re not going to the damn office.”
“Why not?” she said, surprised.
He waved vaguely west, back toward Broadway. “After what happened there? I want you where I can see you, Jodie.”
“I need to go to work, Reacher,” she said. “And be logical. The office hasn’t become unsafe just because of what happened over there. It’s a completely separate proposition, right? The office is still as safe now as it always was. And you were happy for me to go there before, so what’s changed?”
He looked at her. He wanted to say everything’s changed. Because whatever Leon started with some old couple from a cardiology clinic has now got halfway-competent professionals mixed in with it. Halfway-competent professionals who were about half a second away from winning this morning. And he wanted to say: I love you and you’re in danger and I don’t want you anyplace I can’t be looking out for you. But he couldn’t say any of that. Because he had committed himself to keeping it all away from her. All of it, the love and the danger. So he just shrugged, lamely.
“You should come with me,” he said.
“Why? To help?”
He nodded. “Yes, help me with these old folks. They’ll talk to you, because you’re Leon’s daughter.”
“You want me with you because I’m Leon’s daughter?”
He nodded again. She spotted a cab and waved it down.
“Wrong answer, Reacher,” she said.
HE ARGUED WITH her, but he got nowhere. Her mind was made up, and she wouldn’t change it. The best he could do was to get her to solve his immediate problem and rent him a car, with her gold card and her license. They took the cab up to midtown and found a Hertz office. He waited outside in the sun for a quarter hour and then she came around the block in a brand-new Taurus and picked him up. She drove all the way back downtown on Broadway. They passed by her building and passed by the scene of the ambush three blocks south. The damaged vehicles were gone. There were shards of glass in the gutter and oil stains on the blacktop, but that was all. She drove on south and parked next to a hydrant opposite her office door. Left the motor running and racked the seat all the way back, ready for the change of driver.
“OK,” she said. “You’ll pick me up here, about seven o’clock?”
“That late?”
“I’m starting late,” she said. “I’ll have to finish late.”
“Don’t leave the building, OK?”
He got out on the sidewalk and watched her all the way inside. There was a broad paved area in front of the building. She skipped across it, bare legs flashing and dancing under the dress. She turned and smiled and waved. Pushed sideways through the revolving door, swinging her heavy case. It was a tall building, maybe sixty stories. Probably dozens of suites rented to dozens of separate firms, maybe hundreds. But the situation looked like it might be safe enough. There was a wide reception counter immediately inside the revolving door. A line of security guys sitting behind it, and behind them was a solid glass screen, wall to wall, floor to ceiling, with one opening in it, operated by a buzzer under their counter. Behind the screen were the elevators. No way in, unless the security guys saw fit to let you in. He nodded to himself. It might be safe enough. Maybe. It would depend on the diligence of
the doormen. He saw her talking to one of them, head bent, blond hair falling forward. Then she was walking to the door in the screen, waiting, pushing it. She went through to the elevators. Hit a button. A door slid open. She backed in, levering her case over the threshold with both hands. The door slid shut.
He waited out on the paved area for a minute. Then he hurried across and shouldered in through the revolving door. Strode over to the counter like he did it every day of his life. Picked on the oldest security guy. The oldest ones are usually the most sloppy. The younger ones still entertain hopes of advancement.
“They want me up at Spencer Gutman,” he said, looking at his watch.
“Name?” the old guy asked.
“Lincoln,” Reacher said.
The guy was grizzled and tired, but he did what he was supposed to do. He picked a clipboard out of a slot and studied it.
“You got an appointment?”
“They just paged me,” Reacher said. “Some kind of a big hurry, I guess.”
“Lincoln, like the car?”
“Like the president,” Reacher said.
The old guy nodded and ran a thick finger down a long list of names.
“You’re not on the list,” he said. “I can’t let you in, without your name on the list.”
“I work for Costello,” Reacher said. “They need me upstairs, like right now.”
“I could call them,” the guy said. “Who paged you?”
Reacher shrugged. “Mr. Spencer, I guess. He’s who I usually see.”
The guy looked offended. Placed the clipboard back in its slot.
“Mr. Spencer died ten years ago,” he said. “You want to come in, you get yourself a proper appointment, OK?”
Reacher nodded. The place was safe enough. He turned on his heel and headed back to the car.
MARILYN STONE WAITED until Chester’s Mercedes was out of sight and then she ran back to the house and got to work. She was a serious woman, and she knew a possible six-week gap between listing and closing was going to need some serious input.
Her first call was to the cleaning service. The house was already perfectly clean, but she was going to move some furniture out. She took the view that presenting a house slightly empty of furniture created an impression of spaciousness. It made it seem even larger than it was. And it avoided trapping a potential buyer into preconceptions about what would look good, and what wouldn’t. For instance, the Italian credenza in the hallway was the perfect piece for that hallway, but she didn’t want a potential buyer to think the hallway wouldn’t work any other way. Better to just have nothing there, and let the buyer’s imagination fill the gap, maybe with a piece she already had.
So if she was going to move furniture out, she needed the cleaning service to attend to the spaces left behind. A slight lack of furniture created a spacious look, but obvious gaps created a sad look. So she called them, and she called the moving and storage people, too, because she was going to have to put the displaced stuff somewhere. Then she called the pool service, and the gardeners. She wanted them there every morning until further notice, for an hour’s work every day. She needed the yard looking absolutely at its best. Even at this end of the market, she knew curb appeal was king.
Then she tried to remember other stuff she’d read, or things people had told her about. Flowers, of course, in vases, all over the place. She called the florist. She remembered somebody saying saucers of window cleaner neutralized all the little stray smells any house generates. Something to do with the ammonia. She remembered reading that putting a handful of coffee beans in a hot oven made a wonderful welcoming smell. So she put a new packet in her utensil drawer, ready. She figured if she put some in the oven each time Sheryl called to say she was on her way over with clients, that would be timing it about right, in terms of aroma.
8
CHESTER STONE’S DAY started out in the normal way. He drove to work at the usual time. The Benz was as soothing as ever. The sun was shining, as it should be in June. The drive into the city was normal. Normal traffic, no more, no less. The usual rose vendors and paper sellers in the toll plazas. The slackening congestion down the length of Manhattan, proving he’d timed it just right, as he usually did. He parked in his normal leased slot under his building and rode the elevator up to his offices. Then his day stopped being normal.
The place was deserted. It was as if his company had vanished overnight. The staff had all disappeared, instinctively, like rats from a sinking ship. A single phone was trilling on a distant desk. Nobody was sitting there to answer it. The computers were all turned off. The monitor screens were dull gray squares, reflecting the strip lights in the ceiling. His own inner office was always quiet, but now there was a strange hush lying over it. He walked in and heard a sound like a tomb.
“I’m Chester Stone,” he said into the silence.
He said it just to be making some noise in the place, but it came out like a croak. There was no echo, because the thick carpeting and the fiberboard walls soaked up the sound like a sponge. His voice just disappeared in the void.
“Shit,” he said.
He was angry. Mostly with his secretary. She had been with him a long time. She was the sort of employee he expected to stand up and be loyal, with a shy hand on his shoulder, a gleam in her eye, a promise to stay and beat the odds whatever the hell they were. But she’d done the same thing as all the others. She’d heard the rumors coming out of the finance department, the company was bust, the paychecks would bounce, and she’d dumped some old files out of a carton and boxed up the photos of her damn nephews in their cheap brass frames and her ratty old spider plant from her desk and her junk from her drawers and carried it all home on the subway to her neat little apartment, wherever the hell that was. Her neat little apartment, decorated and furnished with his paychecks from when the times were good. She would be sitting there now, in her bathrobe, drinking coffee slowly, an unexpected morning off, never to return to him, maybe leafing through the vacancies in the back of the newspaper, choosing her next port of call.
“Shit,” he said again.
He turned on his heel and barged out through the secretarial pen and back out all the way to the elevator. Rode down to the street and strode out into the sun. Turned west and set out walking fast, in a fury, with his heart thumping. The enormous glittering bulk of the Twin Towers loomed over him. He hurried across the plaza and inside to the elevators. He was sweating. The chill of the lobby air struck through his jacket. He rode the express up to eighty-eight. Stepped out and walked through the narrow corridor and into Hobie’s brass-and-oak lobby for the second time in twenty-four hours.
The male receptionist was sitting behind his counter. On the other side of the lobby a thickset man in an expensive suit was coming out of a small kitchen, carrying two mugs in one hand. Stone could smell coffee. He could see steam rising and brown froth swirling in the mugs. He glanced between the two men.
“I want to see Hobie,” he said.
They ignored him. The thickset man walked over to the counter and set one of the mugs in front of the receptionist. Then he walked back behind Stone and put himself nearer the lobby door than Stone was. The receptionist leaned forward and rotated the coffee mug, carefully adjusting the angle of the handle until it was presented comfortably to his grasp.
“I want to see Hobie,” Stone said again, looking straight ahead.
“My name is Tony,” the receptionist said to him.
Stone just turned and stared at him, blankly. The guy had a red mark on his forehead, like a fresh bruise. The hair on his temple was newly combed but wet, like he’d pressed a cold cloth to his head.
“I want to see Hobie,” Stone said for the third time.
“Mr. Hobie’s not in the office today,” Tony said. “I’ll be dealing with your affairs for the time being. We have matters to discuss, don’t we?”
“Yes, we do,” Stone said.
“So shall we go inside?” Tony said, and stood up.
<
br /> He nodded to the other guy, who slid around the counter and took up position in the chair. Tony came out and stepped across to the inner door. Held it open and Stone walked through into the same gloom as the day before. The blinds were still closed. Tony padded ahead through the dark to the desk. He walked around it and sat down in Hobie’s chair. The sprung base creaked once in the silence. Stone followed after him. Then he stopped and glanced left and right, wondering where he should sit.
“You’ll remain standing,” Tony said to him.
“What?” Stone said back.
“You’ll remain standing for the duration of the interview.”
“What?” Stone said again, astonished.
“Right in front of the desk.”
Stone just stood there, his mouth clamped shut.
“Arms by your sides,” Tony said. “Stand straight and don’t slump.”
