by Lee Child
In the first three stores they found no visual matches and nobody admitted selling the chair that Reacher was carrying.
The fourth store was where they found what they wanted.
It was a double-wide place that had chrome diner furniture out front and a bunch of Chinese owners in back. Behind the gaudy padded stools on the sidewalk were piles of old tables and sets of chairs stacked six high. Behind the piles and the stacks was a jumble of oddments. Including two chairs hung high on a wall that were exact matches for the specimen in Reacher’s hand. Same style, same construction, same color, same age.
“We shoot, we score,” Pauling said.
Reacher checked again, to be certain. But there was no doubt about it. The chairs were identical. Even the grime and the dust on them matched precisely. Same gray, same texture, same consistency.
“Let’s get some help,” he said.
He carried the Sixth Avenue chair to the back of the store where a Chinese guy was sitting behind a rickety table with a closed cash box on it. The guy was old and impassive. The owner, probably. Certainly all transactions would have to pass through his hands. He had the cash box.
“You sold this chair.” Reacher held it up, and nodded back toward the wall where its siblings hung. “About a week ago.”
“Five dollars,” the old guy said.
“I don’t want to buy it,” Reacher said. “And it isn’t yours to sell. You already sold it once. I want to know who you sold it to. That’s all.”
“Five dollars,” the guy said again.
“You’re not understanding me.”
The old guy smiled. “No, I think I’m understanding you very well. You want information about the purchaser of that chair. And I’m telling you that information always has a price. In this case, the price is five dollars.”
“How about you get the chair back? Then you can sell it twice.”
“I already sold it many more times than twice. Places open, places close, assets circulate. The world goes round.”
“Who bought it, a week ago?”
“Five dollars.”
“You sure you’ve got five dollars’ worth of information?”
“I have what I have.”
“Two-fifty plus the chair.”
“You’ll leave the chair anyway. You’re sick of carrying it around.”
“I could leave it next door.”
For the first time the old guy’s eyes moved. He glanced up at the wall. Reacher saw him think: A set of three is better than a pair.
“Four bucks and the chair,” he said.
“Three and the chair,” Reacher said.
“Three and a half and the chair.”
“Three and a quarter and the chair.”
No response.
“Guys, please,” Pauling said.
She stepped up to the rickety desk and opened her purse. Took out a fat black wallet and snapped off a crisp ten from a wad as thick as a paperback book. Placed it on the scarred wood and spun it around and left it there.
“Ten dollars,” she said. “And the damn chair. So make it good.”
The old Chinese man nodded.
“Women,” he said. “Always ready to focus.”
“Tell us who bought the chair,” Pauling said.
“He couldn’t talk,” the old man said.
CHAPTER 33
The old man said, “At first I thought nothing of it. An American comes in, he hears us speaking our own language, very often he assumes we can’t speak English, and he conducts the transaction with a combination of gestures and signs. It’s a little rude in that it assumes ignorance on our part, but we’re used to it. Generally I let such a customer flounder and then I pitch in with a perfectly coherent sentence as a kind of reproach.”
“Like you did with me,” Reacher said.
“Indeed. And as I did with the man you’re evidently seeking. But he was completely unable to reply in any way at all. He just kept his mouth closed and gulped like a fish. I concluded that he had a deformity that prevented speech.”
“Description?” Reacher asked.
The old guy paused a beat to gather his thoughts and then launched into the same rundown that the Sixth Avenue super had given. A white man, late thirties, maybe forty, medium height and weight, clean and neat, no beard, no mustache. Blue jeans, blue shirt, ball cap, sneakers, all of them worn and comfortable. Nothing remarkable or memorable about him except for the fact that he was mute.
“How much did he pay for the chair?” Reacher asked.
“Five dollars.”
“Wasn’t it unusual that a guy would want a single chair?”
“You think I should automatically call the police if someone who isn’t a restaurant owner shops here?”
“Who buys chairs one at a time?”
“Plenty of people,” the old man said. “People who are recently divorced, or down on their luck, or starting a lonely new life in a small East Village apartment. Some of those places are so tiny a single chair is all they want. At a desk, maybe, that does double duty as a dining table.”
“OK,” Reacher said. “I can see that.”
The old man turned to Pauling and asked, “Was my information helpful?”
“Maybe,” Pauling said. “But it didn’t add anything.”
“You already knew about the man who couldn’t talk?”
Pauling nodded.
“Then I’m sorry,” the old man said. “You may keep the chair.”
“I’m sick of carrying it around,” Reacher said.
The old man inclined his head. “As I thought. In which case, feel free to leave it here.”
Pauling led Reacher out to the Bowery sidewalk and the last he saw of the chair was a young guy who could have been a grandson hoisting it up on a pole and hanging it back on the wall next to its two fellows.
“The hard way,” Pauling said.
“Makes no sense,” Reacher said. “Why are they sending the guy that can’t speak to meet with everyone?”
“There must be something even more distinctive about the other one.”
“I hate to think what that might be.”
“Lane abandoned those two guys. So why are you helping him?”
“I’m not helping him. This is for Kate and the kid now.”
“They’re dead. You said so yourself.”
“Then they need a story. An explanation. The who, the where, the why. Everyone needs to know what happened to them. They shouldn’t be allowed to just go, quietly. Someone needs to stand up for them.”
“And that’s you?”
“I play the hand I’m dealt. No use whining about it.”
“And?”
“And they need to be avenged, Pauling. Because it wasn’t their fight. It wasn’t even remotely Jade’s fight, was it? If Hobart or Knight or whichever it was had come after Lane directly, maybe I’d have been on the sidelines cheering him on. But he didn’t. He came after Kate and Jade. And two wrongs don’t make a right.”
“Neither do three wrongs.”
“In this case they do,” Reacher said.
“You never even saw Kate or Jade.”
“I saw their pictures. That was enough.”
“I wouldn’t want you mad at me,” Pauling said.
“No,” Reacher said back. “You wouldn’t.”
They walked north toward Houston Street without any clear idea of where they were going next and on the way Pauling’s cell phone must have vibrated because she pulled it out of her pocket before Reacher heard it ring. Silent cell phones made Reacher nervous. He came from a world where a sudden dive for a pocket was more likely to mean a gun than a phone. Every time it happened he had to endure a little burst of unrequited adrenaline.
Pauling stopped on the sidewalk and said her name loudly over the traffic noise and then listened for a minute. Said thanks and snapped the phone shut. Turned to Reacher and smiled.
“My Pentagon buddy,” she said. “Some solid information. Maybe he bus
ted into someone’s file cabinet after all.”
“Did he get a name for us?” Reacher asked.
“Not yet. But he has a location. It was Burkina Faso. You ever been there?”
“I’ve never been anywhere in Africa.”
“It used to be called Upper Volta. It’s an ex–French colony. About the size of Colorado, population thirteen million, with a GDP about a quarter of what Bill Gates is worth.”
“But with enough spare cash to hire Lane’s crew.”
“Not according to my guy,” Pauling said. “That’s the weird thing. It’s where Knight and Hobart were captured, but there’s no record of their government contracting with Lane.”
“Would your guy expect there to be a record?”
“He says there’s always a record somewhere.”
“We need a name,” Reacher said. “That’s all. We don’t need the history of the world.”
“He’s working on it.”
“But not fast enough. And we can’t wait. We need to try something on our own.”
“Like what?”
“Our guy called himself Leroy Clarkson. Maybe it was a private joke or maybe it was something in his subconscious because he lives over there.”
“Near Clarkson or Leroy?”
“Maybe on Hudson or Greenwich.”
“That’s all gentrified now. A guy just back from five years in an African jail couldn’t afford a closet over there.”
“But a guy who was making good money before the five-year hiatus might already own a place over there.”
Pauling nodded. “We should stop by my office. Start with the phone book.”
There were a few Hobarts and half a page of Knights in the Manhattan White Pages but none of them were in the part of the West Village that would have made Leroy Clarkson an obvious pseudonym. Conceivably one of the Knights might have picked Horatio Gansevoort, and one of the Hobarts might have gone by Christopher Perry, but apart from those two the others lived where the streets were numbered or so far east that their subliminal choices would have been Henry Madison or Allen Eldridge. Or Stanton Rivington.
“Too much like daytime TV,” Pauling said.
She had other databases, the kind of things a conscientious PI with old friends in law enforcement and an internet connection can accumulate. But no unexplained Knights or Hobarts cropped up anywhere.
“He’s been away five years,” Pauling said. “Effectively he’ll have dropped out of sight, won’t he? Disconnected phone, unpaid utilities, like that?”
“Probably,” Reacher said. “But not necessarily. These guys are used to sudden travel. They always were, even back in the day. They usually set up automatic payments.”
“His bank account would have emptied out.”
“Depends how much was in it to start with. If he was earning then what the others are earning now he could have paid for plenty of electric bills especially when he’s not even home to turn on the lights.”
“Lane was a much smaller deal five years ago. They all were, before the terrorism gravy train left the station. Real or phony, Anne’s ransom was only a hundred grand, not ten and a half million. Wages will have been in proportion. This guy won’t have been rich.”
Reacher nodded. “He probably rented anyway. Landlord probably threw all his stuff on the sidewalk years ago.”
“So what do we do?”
“I guess we wait,” Reacher said. “For your bureaucratic buddy. Unless we grow old and die first.”
But a minute later Pauling’s phone went off again. This time it was on her desk, out in full view, and its vibration set up a soft mechanical buzz against the wood. She answered it with her name and listened for a minute. Then she closed it slowly and put it back in place.
“We’re not much older,” she said.
“What’s he got?” Reacher asked.
“Hobart,” she said. “It was Hobart who came back alive.”
CHAPTER 34
Reacher asked, “First name?”
Pauling said, “Clay. Clay James Hobart.”
Reacher asked, “Address?”
Pauling said, “We’re waiting on an answer from the VA.”
“So let’s hit the phone books again.”
“I recycle my old phone books. I don’t keep an archive. I certainly don’t have anything from five years ago.”
“He might have family here. Who better to come back to?”
There were seven Hobarts in the book, but one of them was a duplicate. A dentist, home and office, different places, different numbers, same guy.
“Call them all,” Reacher said. “Make like a VA administrator with a paperwork glitch.”
Pauling put her desk phone on the speaker and got two answering machines with the first two calls and a false alarm on the third. Some old guy with his own VA benefits got all excited in case they were about to disappear. Pauling calmed him down and he said he had never heard of anyone called Clay James Hobart. The fourth and fifth calls were fruitless, too. The sixth call was to the dentist’s office number. He was on vacation in Antigua. His receptionist said he had no relatives called Clay James. The absolute confidence in her answer made Reacher wonder if she was more than just a receptionist. Although she wasn’t in Antigua with him. Maybe she had just worked for him a long time.
“So what now?” Pauling said.
“We’ll try the first two again later,” Reacher said. “Apart from that, it’s back to growing old together.”
But Pauling’s Pentagon buddy was on some kind of a roll because eleven minutes later her cell buzzed again and the guy came through with more information. Reacher saw Pauling put it all down on a yellow pad in fast scrawled handwriting that he couldn’t read upside down and from a distance. Two pages of notes. It was a long call. So long that when it was over Pauling checked the battery icon on her phone and plugged it into a charger.
“Hobart’s address?” Reacher asked her.
“Not yet,” Pauling said. “The VA is balking. There are confidentiality issues.”
“Where he lives isn’t a medical diagnosis.”
“That’s the point my friend is making.”
“So what did he have for us?”
Pauling flipped back to the first page of her notes.
“Lane is on an official Pentagon shit list,” she said.
“Why?”
“You know what Operation Just Cause was?”
“Panama,” Reacher said. “Against Manuel Noriega. More than fifteen years ago. I was there, briefly.”
“Lane was there, too. He was still in uniform back then. He did very well there. That’s where he made full colonel. Then he went to the Gulf the first time around and then he quit under a bit of a cloud. But not enough of a cloud to stop the Pentagon hiring him on as a private contractor afterward. They sent him to Colombia, because he had a reputation as a Central and South America expert, because of his performance during Just Cause. He took the beginnings of his present crew with him to fight one of the cocaine cartels. He took our government’s money to do it but when he got there he also took the target cartel’s money to go wipe out one of their rival cartels instead. The Pentagon wasn’t all that upset because one cartel is as bad as another to them, but they never really trusted Lane afterward and never hired him again.”
“His guys said they’d been to Iraq and Afghanistan.”
Pauling nodded. “After the Twin Towers all kinds of people went all kinds of places. Including Lane’s crew. But only as subcontractors. In other words the Pentagon hired someone they trusted and that someone laid off some of the work to Lane.”
“And that was acceptable?”
“Honor was observed. The Pentagon never wrote another check with Lane’s name on it after that first time in Colombia. But later on they needed all the warm bodies they could get, so they looked the other way.”
“He’s been getting steady work,” Reacher said. “Plenty of income. He lives like a king and most of the African money is s
till in its original wrappers.”
“That just shows you how big this whole racket has gotten. My guy says since Colombia, Lane has been living off the crumbs from other men’s tables. That’s been his only option. Big crumbs at first, but they’re getting smaller. There’s a lot of competition now. Apparently he got rich that one time in Africa, but whatever is left from that payment is basically all the capital he’s got.”
“He makes out like he’s the big dog. He told me he had no rivals or partners.”
“Then he was lying. Or maybe in a sense he was telling the truth. Because he’s at the bottom of the pile. Strictly speaking he has no equals. Only superiors.”
“Was he subcontracting in Burkina Faso, too?” Reacher asked.
“He must have been,” Pauling said. “Otherwise why isn’t he in the records as a principal?”
“Was our government involved there?”
“It’s possible. Certainly my official friend seems a little tense.”
Reacher nodded. “That’s why he’s helping, isn’t it? This is not one MP to another. This is a bureaucracy trying to control the situation. Trying to manage the flow of information. This is someone deciding to feed us stuff privately so we don’t go blundering about and making a lot of noise in public.”
Pauling said nothing. Then her phone went off again. She tried to pick it up with the charger attached but the wire was too short. She unclipped it and answered. Listened for fifteen seconds and turned to a new page in her pad and wrote a dollar sign, and then two numbers, and then six zeroes. She clicked off the phone and spun the pad around so that Reacher could see what she had written.
“Twenty-one million dollars,” she said. “In cash. That’s how rich Lane got in Africa.”
“You were right,” Reacher said. “Big crumbs. Not too shabby for a subcontractor.”
Pauling nodded. “The whole deal was worth a hundred and five million. U.S. dollars in cash from their government’s central reserve. Lane got twenty percent in exchange for supplying half the manpower and agreeing to do most of the work.”
