by Lee Child
“He was a Recon Marine. He was in prison in Africa for five years. He’s used to discomfort.”
“I meant tactically. This part of town, he would have been afraid of getting busted for a drug dealer. Or a terrorist. South of Twenty-third Street they don’t like you to hang around at all anymore.”
“So where was he?”
Reacher looked left, looked right.
Then he looked up.
“You mentioned Patti Joseph’s place,” he said. “You called it an aerie.”
“So?”
“What’s an aerie?”
“It’s an eagle’s nest.”
“Exactly. From the Old French for lair. The point is that Patti is reasonably high up. Seven prewar floors, that’s a little above treetop height. An unobstructed view. A Recon Marine wants an unobstructed view. And he can’t guarantee that at street level. A panel truck could park right in front of him at the wrong moment.”
Lauren Pauling turned back to face the curb and spread her arms again, this time raised at an angle. She mimed the same karate chops with her hands. They bracketed the upper floors of the same five buildings.
“Where did he come from, the first time?” she asked.
“From south of me,” Reacher said. “From my right. I was facing a little north and east, at the end table. But he was coming back from Spring Street then. No way of knowing where he had started out from. I sat down, ordered coffee, and he was in the car before they even brought it to me.”
“But the second time, after Burke switched the bag, he must have been coming straight from the observation point, right?”
“He was almost at the car when I saw him.”
“Still moving?”
“Final two paces.”
“From what direction?”
Reacher moved up the sidewalk to where he had been after strolling around the corner from Bleecker. In his mind he put a green Jaguar beyond Pauling on the curb and pictured the guy’s last two fluid strides toward it. Then he lined up the apparent vector and checked the likely point of origin. Kept his eyes on it as he stepped back to Pauling.
“Actually very similar to the first time,” he said to her. “North and east through the traffic. From the south of where I was sitting.”
Pauling adjusted the position of her right arm. Brought her hand south and chopped the air a fraction to the left of the café’s most northerly table. That cut the view to just a slim section of the streetscape. Half of the building with the flower store in it, and most of the building with the café in it. Above the flower store were three stories of windows with vertical blinds behind them and printers and spider plants and stacks of paper on their sills. Fluorescent tubes on the ceilings.
“Office suites,” Pauling said.
Above the café were three stories of windows filled variously with faded drapes made of red Indian cloth, or macramé hangings, or suspended discs of stained glass. One had nothing at all. One was papered over with newsprint. One had a Che Guevara poster taped face-out on the inside of the glass.
“Apartments,” Pauling said.
Jammed between the flower store and the café was a blue recessed door. To its left was a dull silver box, with buttons and nameplates and a speaker grille. Reacher said, “A person who came out that door heading for the fireplug would have to cross north and east through the traffic, right?”
Pauling said, “We found him.”
CHAPTER 30
The silver box to the left of the blue door had six black call buttons in a vertical array. The top nameplate had Kublinski written very neatly in pale faded ink. The bottom had Super scrawled with a black marker pen. The middle four were blank.
“Low rent,” Pauling said. “Short leases. Transients. Except for Mr. or Ms. Kublinski. Judging by that handwriting style they’ve been here forever.”
“They probably moved to Florida fifty years ago,” Reacher said. “Or died. And nobody changed the tag.”
“Shall we try the super?”
“Use one of your business cards. Put your finger over the Ex- part. Make out like you’re still with the Bureau.”
“Think that’ll be necessary?”
“We need all the help we can get. This is a radical building. We’ve got Che Guevara watching over us. And macramé.”
Pauling put an elegant nail on the super’s call button and pressed. She was answered a long minute later by a distorted burst of sound from the speaker. It might have been the word yes, or who, or what. Or just a blast of static.
“Federal agents,” Pauling called. Which was remotely true. Both she and Reacher had once worked for Uncle Sam. She slipped a business card out of her purse. There was another burst of noise from the speaker.
“He’s coming,” Reacher said. He had seen plenty of buildings like this one, back in the day, when his job had been chasing AWOL soldiers. They liked cash rents and short leases. And in his experience building superintendents usually cooperated. They liked their free accommodations well enough not to jeopardize them. Better that someone else should go to jail, and they should stay where they were.
Unless the super was the bad guy, of course.
But this one seemed to have nothing to hide. The blue door opened inward and revealed a tall gaunt man in a stained wife-beater. He had a black knit cap on his head and a flat Slavic face like a length of two by-four.
“Yes?” he said. Strong Russian accent. Almost Da?
Pauling waved her card long enough for some of the words to register.
“Tell us about your most recent tenant,” she said.
“Most recent?” the guy repeated. No hostility. He sounded like a fairly smart guy struggling with the nuance of a foreign language, that was all.
Reacher asked, “Did someone sign on within the last couple of weeks?”
“Number five,” the guy said. “One week ago. He responded to a newspaper advertisement I was asked to place by the management.”
“We need to see his apartment,” Pauling said.
“I’m not sure I should let you,” the guy said. “There are rules in America.”
“Homeland Security,” Reacher said. “The Patriot Act. There are no rules in America anymore.”
The guy just shrugged and turned his tall thin frame around in the narrow space. Headed for the stairs. Reacher and Pauling followed him in. Reacher could smell coffee coming through the walls from the café. There was no apartment number one or number two. Number four was the first door they came to, at the head of the stairs at the back of the building. Then number three was on the same floor, along a hallway at the front of the building. Which meant that number five was going to be directly above it, third floor, looking east across the street. Pauling glanced at Reacher, and Reacher nodded.
“The one with nothing in the window,” he said to her.
On the third floor they passed number six at the back of the building and walked forward toward number five. The smell of coffee had faded and been replaced by the universal hallway smell of boiled vegetables.
“Is he in?” Reacher asked.
The super shook his head. “I only ever saw him twice. He’s out now for sure. I was just all over the building fixing pipes.” He used a master key from a ring on his belt and unlocked the door. Pushed it open and stood back.
The apartment was what a real estate broker would have called an alcove studio. All one room, with a crooked L that was theoretically large enough for a bed if the bed was small. A kitchen corner and a tiny bathroom with an open door. But mostly what was on show was dust and floorboards.
Because the apartment was completely empty.
Except for a single upright dining chair. The chair was not old, but it was well used. It was the kind of thing you see for sale on the Bowery sidewalks where the bankrupt restaurant dealers hawk seized inventory. It was set in front of the window and turned slightly north and east. It was about twenty feet above and three feet behind the exact spot that Reacher had chosen for coffee, t
wo nights running.
Reacher stepped over and sat down on the chair, feet planted, relaxed but alert. The way his body settled naturally put the fireplug across Sixth directly in front of him. A shallow downward angle, easily enough to clear a parked panel truck. Enough to clear a parked semi. A ninety-foot range. No problem for anyone who wasn’t clinically blind. He stood up again and turned a full circle. Saw a door that locked. Saw three solid walls. Saw a window free of drapes. A soldier knows that a satisfactory observation point provides an unobstructed view to the front and adequate security to the flanks and the rear, provides protection from the elements and concealment of the observers, and offers a reasonable likelihood of undisturbed occupation for the full duration of the operation.
“Feels just like Patti Joseph’s place,” Pauling said.
“You been there?”
“Brewer described it.”
“Eight million stories,” Reacher said.
Then he turned to the super and said, “Tell us about this guy.”
“He can’t talk,” the super said.
“What do you mean?”
“He can’t speak.”
“What, like he’s a mute?”
“Not by birth. Because of a trauma.”
“Like something struck him dumb?”
“Not emotional,” the super said. “Physical. He communicated with me by writing on a pad of yellow paper. Full sentences, quite patiently. He wrote that he had been injured in the service. Like a war wound. But I noticed that he had no visible scarring. And I noticed that he kept his mouth tight shut all the time. Like he was embarrassed about me seeing something. And it reminded me very strongly of something I saw once before, more than twenty years ago.”
“Which was?”
“I am Russian. For my sins I served with the Red Army in Afghanistan. Once we had a prisoner returned to us by the tribesmen as a warning. His tongue had been cut out.”
CHAPTER 31
The super took Reacher and Pauling down to his own apartment, which was a squared-away semi-basement space in the back of the building. He opened a file cabinet and took out the current lease papers for apartment five. They had been signed exactly a week previously by a guy calling himself Leroy Clarkson. Which as expected was a blatantly phony name. Clarkson and Leroy were the first two streets coming off the West Side Highway north of Houston, just a few blocks away. At the far end of Clarkson was a topless bar. At the far end of Leroy was a car wash. In between was a tiny aluminum coach diner that Reacher had once eaten in.
“You don’t see ID?” Pauling asked.
“Not unless they want to pay by check,” the super said. “This guy paid cash.”
The signature was illegible. The Social Security number was neatly written but was no doubt just a random sequence of nine meaningless digits.
The super gave a decent physical description, but it didn’t help much because it did nothing more than match what Reacher himself had seen on two separate occasions. Late thirties, maybe forty, white, medium height and weight, clean and trim, no facial hair. Blue jeans, blue shirt, ball cap, sneakers, all of them worn and comfortable.
“How was his health?” Reacher asked.
“Apart from the fact that he couldn’t speak?” the super said. “He seemed OK.”
“Did he say if he’d been out of town for a while?”
“He didn’t say anything.”
“How long did he pay for?”
“A month. It’s the minimum. Renewable.”
“This guy’s not coming back,” Reacher said. “You should go ahead and call The Village Voice now. Get them to run your ad again.”
“What happened to your pal from the Red Army?” Pauling asked.
“He lived,” the super said. “Not happily, but he lived.”
Reacher and Pauling came out the blue door and took three paces north and stopped in for espresso. They took the end table on the sidewalk and Reacher took the same seat he had used twice before.
Pauling said, “So he wasn’t working alone.”
Reacher said nothing.
Pauling said, “Because he couldn’t have made the phone calls.”
Reacher didn’t reply.
Pauling said, “Tell me about the voice you heard.”
“American,” Reacher said. “The machine couldn’t disguise the words or the cadence or the rhythm. And he was patient. Intelligent, in command, in control, not worried. Familiar with the geography of New York City. Possibly military, from a couple of phrases. He wanted to know Burke’s name, which suggests he’s familiar with Lane’s crew or he was calibrating a lie detector. Apart from that, I’m just guessing. The distortion was huge. But I felt he wasn’t old. There was a lightness there. A kind of nimbleness in his voice. Maybe he was a small guy.”
“Like a Special Forces veteran.”
“Possibly.”
“Unworried and in command makes him sound like the prime mover here. Not like a sidekick.”
Reacher nodded. “Good point. I felt that way, listening to him. It was like he was calling the shots. Like an equal partner, at the very least.”
“So who the hell is he?”
“If your Pentagon guy hadn’t told us different I’d say it was both of Hobart and Knight, both still alive, back here together, working together.”
“But it isn’t,” Pauling said. “My Pentagon guy wouldn’t get that kind of thing wrong.”
“So whichever one came back alive picked up a new partner.”
“One that he trusts,” Pauling said. “And he did it real fast.”
Reacher gazed over at the hydrant. Traffic obscured his view in waves, held back and then released by the light at Houston.
“Would a remote clicker work at this distance?” he asked.
“For a car?” Pauling said. “Maybe. I guess it would depend on the car. Why?”
“After Burke switched the bag I heard a sound like car doors locking. I guess the guy did it from up there in his room. He was watching. He didn’t want to leave the money in an unlocked car for a second longer than he had to.”
“Sensible.”
Reacher paused a beat. “But you know what isn’t sensible? Why was he up there in the room at all?”
“We know why he was up there.”
“No, why was he up there and not the other guy? We’ve got two guys here, one can talk and the other can’t. Why would the guy who can’t talk go rent the apartment? Anyone who comes into contact with him isn’t going to forget him in a hurry. And what’s an observation point for anyway? It’s for command and control. As the visible situation develops the observer is supposed to issue a stream of orders and adjustments. But this guy couldn’t even get on a cell phone. What do we suppose happened exactly, the first two times with Gregory? The guy is upstairs, he sees Gregory park, what can he do? He can’t even get on the phone and tell his partner to stand by down at Spring Street.”
“Text messaging,” Pauling said.
“What’s that?”
“You can send written words by cell phone.”
“When did that start?”
“Years ago.”
“OK,” Reacher said. “Live and learn.” Then he said, “But I still don’t see why they sent the guy who couldn’t talk to meet with the building super.”
“Neither do I,” Pauling said.
“Or to run the OP. It would make more sense if he had been on the other end of the phone. He can’t talk, but he can listen.”
Silence for a moment.
“What next?” Pauling asked.
“Hard work,” Reacher said. “You up for it?”
“Are you hiring me?”
“No, you’re putting whatever else you’re doing on hold and you’re volunteering. Because if we do this right you’ll find out what happened to Anne Lane five years ago. No more sleepless nights.”
“Unless I find out five years ago was for real. Then I might never sleep again.”
“Life’s a gambl
e,” Reacher said. “It wouldn’t be so much fun otherwise.”
Pauling was quiet for a long moment.
“OK,” she said. “I’m volunteering.”
Reacher said, “So go hassle our Soviet pal again. Get the chair. They bought it within the last week. We’ll walk it over to the Bowery and find out where it came from. Maybe the new buddy picked it out. Maybe someone will remember him.”
CHAPTER 32
Reacher carried the chair in his hand like a bag and he and Pauling walked together east. South of Houston the Bowery had organized itself into a sequence of distinct retail areas. Like a string of unofficial malls. There were electrical supplies, and lighting fixtures, and used office gear, and industrial kitchen equipment, and restaurant front-of-house outlets. Reacher liked the Bowery. It was his kind of a street.
The chair in his hand was fairly generic, but it had a certain number of distinguishing characteristics. Impossible to describe it a moment after closing the door on it, but with it right there for direct comparison a match might be found. They started with the northernmost of six separate chaotic establishments. Less than a hundred yards of real estate, but if someone buys a used dining chair in Manhattan, chances are he buys it somewhere in that hundred yards.
Put the good stuff in the store window was the usual retail mantra. But on the Bowery the actual store windows were secondary to the sidewalk displays. And the chair in Reacher’s hand wasn’t the good stuff, in the sense that it couldn’t have been part of a large matched set, or it wouldn’t have been sold separately. Nobody with a set of twenty-four chairs leaves himself with twenty-three. So Reacher and Pauling pushed past the stuff on the sidewalk and squeezed through the narrow doors and looked at the dusty items inside. Looked at the sad leftovers, the part-sets, the singletons. They saw a lot of chairs. All the same, all different. Four legs, seats, backs, but the range of shapes and details was tremendous. None looked very comfortable. Reacher had read somewhere that there was a science to building a restaurant chair. It had to be durable, obviously, and good value for money, and it had to look reasonably inviting, but it couldn’t in reality be too comfortable or the patrons would sit all night and a potential three-sitting evening would turn into an actual two sittings and the restaurant would lose money. Portion control and table turnover were the important factors in the restaurant trade, and Reacher figured chair manufacturers were totally on board with the turnover part.
