by Lee Child
“Gut feeling?”
“What’s yours?”
Reacher shrugged. “Brewer said something to me. He said he just didn’t know, which was weird for him, he said, because whereas he was sometimes wrong, he always knew. And I’m exactly the same. I always know. Except this time I don’t know. So what’s on my mind right now is that I have nothing on my mind.”
“I think it was a genuine kidnap,” Pauling said. “I think I blew it.”
“Do you?”
She paused a beat. Shook her head.
“Not really,” she said. “Truthfully, I just don’t know. God knows I want Lane to have done it. Obviously. And maybe he did. But for the sake of my sanity I have to acknowledge that’s mostly wishful thinking, to excuse myself. And I have to file the whole thing somewhere, mentally. So I tend to come down on the side of avoiding self-indulgence and cheap consolation. And usually the simple option is the right option anyway. So it was a simple kidnap, not an elaborate charade. And I blew it.”
“How did you blow it?”
“I don’t know. I’ve lain awake a hundred nights going over it. I don’t see how I made a mistake.”
“So maybe you didn’t blow it. Maybe it was an elaborate charade.”
“What’s on your mind, Reacher?”
He looked at her.
“Whatever it was, it’s happening again,” he said.
CHAPTER 25
Lauren Pauling sat forward in her chair and said, “Tell me.” So Reacher told her, everything, from the first night in the café, the first double espresso in its foam cup, the badly parked Mercedes Benz, the anonymous driver threading through the Sixth Avenue traffic on foot and then driving the Benz away. The second day, with Gregory scouting witnesses. The third day, with the unopened red door and the blue BMW. And then the nightmare electronic voice, guiding the black BMW back to the exact same fireplug.
“If that’s a charade it’s unbelievably elaborate,” Pauling said.
“My feeling exactly,” Reacher said.
“And insanely expensive.”
“Maybe not,” Reacher said.
“You mean because the money comes around in a big circle?”
“I haven’t actually seen any money. All I’ve seen are zippered bags.”
“Cut up newspaper?”
“Maybe,” Reacher said. “If it’s a charade.”
“What if it isn’t?”
“Exactly.”
“It feels real.”
“And if it isn’t real, I can’t imagine who’s doing it. He would need people he trusts, which means A-teamers, but there’s nobody AWOL.”
“Were they getting along? Man and wife?”
“Nobody says otherwise.”
“So it’s real.”
Reacher nodded. “There’s an internal consistency to it. The initial takedown must have depended on an inside tip, as to where Kate and Jade were going to be, and when. And we can prove that inside involvement two ways. First, these people know something about Lane’s operation. They know exactly what cars he’s got, for instance.”
“And second?”
“Something that was nagging at me. Something about cops. I asked Lane to repeat what was said during the first phone call. And he did, word for word. And the bad guys never said no cops. That’s kind of standard, isn’t it? Like, Don’t go to the cops. But that was never said. Which suggests these people knew the story from five years ago. They knew Lane wouldn’t go to the cops anyway. So it didn’t need saying.”
“That would suggest that five years ago was for real.”
“Not necessarily. It might only reflect what Lane put out there for public consumption.”
“If it’s real this time, does that make it more likely it was real last time?”
“Maybe, maybe not. But whatever, give yourself a break.”
“This is like a hall of fun house mirrors.”
Reacher nodded. “But there’s one thing I can’t make fit under any scenario. Which is the initial takedown itself. The only viable method would have been quick and dirty inside the car, as soon as it stopped. Everyone agrees on that. I asked a couple of Lane’s guys, theoretically, in case there was something I hadn’t thought of. But there wasn’t. And the problem is, Bloomingdale’s is a whole block long. How could anyone have predicted exactly what yard of Lexington Avenue Taylor’s Jaguar was going to stop on? And if they didn’t predict it exactly right, then the whole thing would have fallen apart immediately, there and then. Either Kate and Jade would have been out on the sidewalk already, or Taylor would have seen the takedown guy running up, in which case he would have reacted and taken off. Or at least hit the door locks.”
“So what are you saying?”
“I’m saying real or fake there’s something wrong with this whole thing. I’m saying I can’t get a handle on what happened. I can’t get traction. I’m saying for the first time in my life I just don’t know. Like Brewer said, I’ve been wrong plenty of times, but I’ve always known before.”
“You should talk to Brewer, officially.”
“No point. NYPD can’t do anything without a complaint from Lane. Or at least a missing person report from someone with an interest.”
“So what are you going to do?”
“I’m going to have to do it the hard way,” Reacher said.
“What way is that?”
“It’s what we called it in the service when we didn’t catch a break. When we actually had to work for a living. You know, start over at square one, re-examine everything, sweat the details, work the clues.”
“Kate and Jade are probably already dead.”
“Then I’ll make someone pay.”
“Can I help?”
“I need to know about two guys called Hobart and Knight.”
Pauling nodded. “Knight was the driver the day Anne was taken and Hobart was in Philadelphia. Now Patti Joseph talks about them. They died overseas.”
“Maybe they didn’t die overseas. They were abandoned wounded but alive. I need to know where, when, how, and what’s likely to have happened to them.”
“You think they’re alive? You think they’re back?”
“I don’t know what to think. But at least one of Lane’s guys wasn’t sleeping too well last night.”
“I met Hobart and Knight, you know. Five years ago. During the investigation.”
“Did either of them look like the guy I saw?”
“Medium-sized and ordinary-looking? Both of them, exactly.”
“That helps.”
“What are you going to do now?”
“I’m going back to the Dakota. Maybe we’ll get a call and this whole thing will be over. But more likely we won’t, and it’s just beginning.”
“Give me three hours,” Pauling said. “Then call my cell.”
CHAPTER 26
By the time Reacher got back to the Dakota it was seven o’clock and dawn had given way to full morning. The sky was a pale hard blue. No cloud. Just a beautiful late-summer day in the capital of the world. But inside the fifth floor apartment the air was foul and hot and the drapes were still drawn. Reacher didn’t need to ask whether the phone had rung. Clearly it hadn’t. The tableau was the same as it had been nine hours earlier. Lane upright in his chair. Then Gregory, Groom, Burke, Perez, Addison, Kowalski, all silent, all morose, all arrayed here and there, eyes closed, eyes open, staring into space, breathing low.
Medals not approved.
General discharges.
Bad guys.
Lane turned his head slowly and looked straight at Reacher and asked, “Where the hell have you been?”
“Breakfast,” Reacher said.
“Long breakfast. What was it, five courses at the Four Seasons?”
“A diner,” Reacher said. “Bad choice. Slow service.”
“I pay you to work. I don’t pay you to be out stuffing your face.”
“You don’t pay me at all,” Reacher said. “I haven’t seen dime one
yet.”
Lane kept his body facing forward and his head turned ninety degrees to the side. Like a querulous sea bird. His eyes were dark and wet and glittering.
“Is that your problem?” he asked. “Money?”
Reacher said nothing.
“That’s easily solved,” Lane said.
He kept his eyes on Reacher’s face and put his hands on the chair arms, palms down, pale parchment skin ridged with tendons and veins ghostly in the yellow light. He levered himself upright, with an effort, like it was the first time he had moved in nine hours, which it probably was. He stood unsteadily and walked toward the lobby, stiffly, shuffling like he was old and infirm.
“Come,” he said. Like a command. Like the colonel he had been. Reacher followed him to the master bedroom suite. The pencil post bed, the armoire, the desk. The silence. The photograph. Lane opened his closet. The narrower of the two doors. Inside was a shallow recess, and then another door. To the left of the inner door was a security keypad. It was the same type of three-by-three-plus-zero matrix as Lauren Pauling had used at her office. Lane used his left hand. Index finger, curled. Ring finger, straight. Middle finger, straight. Middle finger, curled. 3785, Reacher thought. Dumb or distracted to let me see. The keypad beeped and Lane opened the inner door. Reached inside and pulled a chain. A light came on and showed a chamber maybe six feet by three. It was stacked with cube-shaped bales of something wrapped tight in heavy heat-shrunk plastic. Dust and foreign printing on the plastic. At first Reacher didn’t know what he was looking at.
Then he realized: The printing was French, and it said Banque Centrale.
Central Bank.
Money.
U.S. dollars, bricked and banded and stacked and wrapped. Some cubes were neat and intact. One was torn open and spilling bricks. The floor was littered with empty plastic wrap. It was the kind of thick plastic that would take real effort to tear. You would have to jam a thumbnail through and hook your fingers in the hole and really strain. It would stretch. It would part reluctantly.
Lane bent at the waist and dragged the open bale out into the bedroom. Then he lifted it and swung it through a small arc and let it fall on the floor near Reacher’s feet. It skidded on the shiny hardwood and two slim bricks of cash fell out.
“There you go,” Lane said. “Dime one.”
Reacher said nothing.
“Pick it up,” Lane said. “It’s yours.”
Reacher said nothing. Just moved away to the door.
“Take it,” Lane said.
Reacher stood still.
Lane bent down again and picked up a spilled brick. He hefted it in his hand. Ten thousand dollars. A hundred hundreds.
“Take it,” he said again.
Reacher said, “We’ll talk about a fee if I get a result.”
“Take it!” Lane screamed. Then he hurled the brick straight at Reacher’s chest. It struck above the breastbone, dense, surprisingly heavy. It bounced off and hit the floor. Lane picked up the other loose brick and threw it. It hit the same spot.
“Take it!” he screamed.
Then he bent down and plunged his hands into the plastic and started hauling out one brick after another. He threw them wildly, without pausing, without straightening, without looking, without aiming. They hit Reacher in the legs, in the stomach, in the chest, in the head. Wild random salvos, ten thousand dollars at a time. A torrent. Real agony in the force of the throws. Then there were tears streaming down Lane’s face and he was screaming uncontrollably, panting, sobbing, gasping, punctuating each wild throw with: Take it! Take it! Then: Get her back! Get her back! Get her back! Then: Please! Please! There was rage and pain and hurt and fear and anger and loss in every desperate yelp.
Reacher stood there smarting slightly from the multiple impacts, with hundreds of thousands of dollars littered at his feet, and he thought: Nobody’s that good of an actor.
He thought: This time it’s real.
CHAPTER 27
Reacher waited in the inner hallway and listened to Lane calm down. He heard the sink running in the bathroom. Washing his face, he thought. Cold water. He heard the scrape of paper on hardwood and the quiet crackle of plastic as the bale of cash was reassembled. He heard Lane drag the bale back into the inner closet. He heard the door close, and he heard the keypad beep to confirm it was locked. Then he walked back to the living room. Lane followed a minute later and sat down in his chair, quietly, calmly, like nothing at all had happened, and stared at the silent phone.
It rang just before seven forty-five. Lane snatched it out of the cradle and said “Yes?” in a voice that was a shout strangled to almost nothing by sheer tension. Then his face went blank and he shook his head in impatience and irritation. Wrong caller. He listened for ten seconds more and hung up.
“Who was it?” Gregory asked.
“Just a friend,” Lane said. “A guy I reached out to earlier. He’s had his ear to the ground for me. Cops found a body in the Hudson River this morning. A floater. At the 79th Street boat basin. Unidentified white male, maybe forty years old. Shot once.”
“Taylor?”
“Has to be,” Lane said. “The river is quiet up there. And it’s an easy detour off the West Side Highway, at the boat basin. Ideal for someone heading north.”
Gregory asked: “So what do we do?”
“Now?” Lane said. “Nothing. We wait here. We wait for the right phone call. The one we want.”
It never came. Ten long hours of anticipation ended at eight o’clock in the morning and the phone did not ring. It did not ring at eight-fifteen, or eight-thirty, or eight forty-five. It did not ring at nine o’clock. It was like waiting for a stay of execution from the Governor’s mansion that never came. Reacher thought that a defense team with an innocent client must run through the same range of emotions: puzzlement, anxiety, shock, disbelief, disappointment, hurt, anger, outrage.
Then despair.
The phone did not ring at nine-thirty.
Lane closed his eyes and said, “Not good.”
Nobody replied.
By a quarter to ten in the morning all the resolve had leaked out of Lane’s body like he had accepted something inevitable. He sank into the chair cushion and laid his head back and opened his eyes and stared up at the ceiling.
“It’s over,” he said. “She’s gone.”
Nobody spoke.
“She’s gone,” Lane said again. “Isn’t she?”
Nobody answered. The room was totally silent. Like a wake, or the bloodstained site of a fatal and tragic accident, or a funeral, or a service of remembrance, or an ER trauma room after a failed operation. Like a heart monitor that had been beeping bravely and resolutely against impossible odds had just abruptly gone quiet.
Flatline.
At ten o’clock in the morning Lane raised his head off the back of the chair and said, “OK.” Then he said it again: “OK.” Then he said, “Now we move on. We do what we have to do. We seek and destroy. As long as it takes. But justice will be done. Our kind of justice. No cops, no lawyers, no trials. No appeals. No process, no prison, no painless lethal injections.”
Nobody spoke.
“For Kate,” Lane said. “And for Taylor.”
Gregory said, “I’m in.”
“All the way,” Groom said.
“Like always,” Burke said.
Perez nodded. “To the death.”
“I’m there,” Addison said.
“I’ll make them wish they had never been born,” Kowalski said.
Reacher checked their faces. Six men, less than a rifle company, but with a whole army’s worth of lethal determination.
“Thank you,” Lane said.
Then he sat forward, newly energized. He turned to face Reacher directly. “Almost the first thing you ever said in this room was that these guys of mine could start a war against them, but first we had to find them. Do you remember that?”
Reacher nodded.
“So find them,” Lane s
aid.
Reacher detoured via the master bedroom and picked up the framed photograph from the desk. The inferior print. The one with Jade in it. He held it carefully so as not to smudge the glass. Looked at it, long and hard. For you, he thought. For both of you. Not for him. Then he put the photograph back and walked quietly out of the apartment.
Seek and destroy.
He started at the same pay phone he had used before. Took the card out of his shoe and dialed Lauren Pauling’s cell. Said, “It’s real this time and they’re not coming back.”
She said, “Can you be at the United Nations in half an hour?”
CHAPTER 28
Reacher couldn’t get close to the U.N. Building’s entrance because of security, but he saw Lauren Pauling waiting for him in the middle of the First Avenue sidewalk. Clearly she had the same problem. No pass, no clearance, no magic words. She had a printed scarf around her shoulders. She looked good. She was ten years older than him, but he liked what he saw. He started toward her and then she saw him and they met in the middle.
“I called in a favor,” she said. “We’re meeting with an army officer from the Pentagon who liaises with one of the U.N. committees.”
“On what subject?”
“Mercenaries,” Pauling said. “We’re supposed to be against them. We signed all kinds of treaties.”
“The Pentagon loves mercenaries. It employs them all the time.”
“But it likes them to go where it sends them. It doesn’t like them to fill their down time with unauthorized sideshows.”
“Is that where they lost Knight and Hobart? On a sideshow?”
“Somewhere in Africa,” Pauling said.
“Does this guy have the details?”
“Some of them. He’s reasonably senior, but he’s new. He’s not going to tell you his name, and you’re not allowed to ask. Deal?”
“Does he know my name?”
“I didn’t tell him.”
“OK, that sounds fair.”
Then her cell phone chimed. She answered it and listened and looked around.
“He’s in the plaza,” she said. “He can see us but he doesn’t want to walk right up to us. We have to go to a coffee shop on Second. He’ll follow.”
