Authors: Lee Child
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 defence 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 said. 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 dialled 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 favour," 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." The coffee shop was one of those mostly brown places that survive on equal parts counter trade, booth trade, and to-go coffee in cardboard cups with Greek decoration on them. Pauling led Reacher to a booth all the way in back and sat so she could watch the door. Reacher slid in next to her. He never sat any other way than with his back to a wall. Long habit, even in a place with plenty of mirrors, which the coffee shop had. They were tinted bronze and made the narrow unit look wide. Made everyone look tan, like they were just back from the beach. Pauling waved to the waitress and mouthed coffee and held up three fingers. The waitress came over and dumped three heavy brown mugs on the table and filled them from a Bunn flask.
Reacher took a sip. Hot, strong, and generic.
He made the Pentagon guy before he was even in through the door. There was no doubt about what he was. Army, but not necessarily a fighting man. Maybe just a bureaucrat. Dull. Not old, not young, corn-collared buzz cut, cheap blue wool suit, white broadcloth button-down shirt, striped tie, good shoes polished to a mirror shine. A different kind of uniform. It was the kind of outfit a captain or a major would wear to his sister-in-law's second wedding. Maybe this guy had bought it for that very purpose, long before a spell of resume-building temporary detached duty in New York City appeared in his future.
The guy paused inside the door and looked around. Not looking for us, Reacher thought. Looking for anyone else who knows him. If he sees somebody, he'll fake a phone call and turn around and leave. Doesn't want any awkward questions later. He's not so dumb after all.
Then he thought: Pauling's not so dumb, either. She knows people who can get in trouble just by being seen with the wrong folks.
But the guy evidently saw nothing to worry about. He walked on back and slid in opposite Pauling and Reacher and after a brief glance at each of their faces he cantered his gaze between their heads and kept his eyes on the mirror. Up close Reacher saw that he was wearing a black subdued-order crossed-pistols lapel pin and that he had mild scarring on one side of his face. Maybe grenade or IED shrapnel at maximum range. Maybe he had been a fighting man. Or maybe it was a childhood shotgun accident.
"I don't have much for you," the guy said. "Private-enterprise Americans fighting overseas are rightly considered to be very bad news, especially when they go fight in Africa. So this stuff is very compartmentalized and need-to-know and it was before my time, so I simply don't know very much about it. So all I can give you is what you can probably guess anyway."
"Where was it?" Reacher asked.
"I'm not even sure of that. Burkina Faso or Mali, I think. One of those small West African places. Frankly there are so many of them in trouble it's hard to keep track. It was the usual deal. Civil war. A scared government, a bunch of rebels ready to come out of the jungle. An unreliable military. So the government pays through the nose and buys what protection it can on the international market."
"Does one of those countries speak French?'
"As their official language? Both of them. Why?"
"I saw some of the money. In plastic wrap printed in French. Banque Centrale, Central Bank."
"How much?"
"More than you or I would earn in two lifetimes."
"U.S. dollars?"
Reacher nodded. "Lots of them."
"Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't."
"Did it work this time?"
"No," the guy said. "The story that did the rounds was that Edward Lane took the money and ran. Can't blame him for running, I guess. They were hopelessly outnumbered and strategically weak."
"But not everyone got out."
The guy nodded. "It seemed that way. But getting information out of those places is like trying to get a radio signal from the dark side of the moon. It's mostly silence and static. And when it isn't, it's faint and garbled. So usually we rely on the Red Cross or Doctors Without Borders. And eventually we got a solid report that two Americans had been captured. A year later we got names. It was Knight and Hobart. Recon Marines back in the day, mixed records."
"It surprises me that they stayed alive."
"The rebels won. They became the new government. They emptied the jails, because the jails were full of their buddies. But a government needs full jails, to keep the population scared. So the old good guys became the new bad guys. Anyone who had worked for the old regime was suddenly in big trouble. And a couple of Americans were like trophies. So they were kept alive. But they suffered very cruelly. The Doctors Without Borders report was horrific. Appalling. Mutilation for sport was a fact of life."
"Details?"
"I guess there are lots of bad things a man can do with a knife."
"You didn't think about a rescue attempt?"
"You're not listening," the guy said. "The State Department can't admit that there are bunches of renegade American mercenaries running wild in Africa. And like I told you, the rebels became the new government. They're in charge now. We have to be nice to them. Because all those places have got stuff that we want. There's oil, and diamonds, and uranium. Alcoa needs tin and bauxite and copper. Halliburton wants to get in there and make a buck. Corporations from Texas want to get in there and run those same damn jails."
"Anything about what happened in the end?"
"It's sketchy, but you can join the dots. One died in captivity, but the other one got out, according to the Red Cross. Some kind of humanitarian gesture that the Red Cross pushed for, to celebrate the fifth anniversary of the coup. They let out a whole bunch. End of story. That's all the news there is from Africa. One died and one got out, relatively recently. But then, if you do some detective work and jump to the INS, you find a lone individual entering the U.S. from Africa shortly afterward on Red Cross documentation. And then, if you jump to the Veterans Administration, there's a report of someone just back from Africa getting the kind of remedial outpatient care that might be consistent with tropical diseases and some of the mutilations that DWB reported on."
Reacher asked, "Which one got out?"
"I don't know," the guy said. "All I've heard is that one got out and the other didn't."
"I need more than that."
"I told you, the initial event was before my time. I'm not specifically in the loop. All I've got is water-cooler stuff."
"I need his name," Reacher said. "And I need his address, from the VA."
"That's a tall order," the guy said. "I would have to go way beyond my remit. And I would need a very good reason to do that."
"Look at me," Reacher said.
The guy took his eyes off the mirror and glanced at Reacher.
Reacher said, "Ten-sixty-two."
No reaction.
Reacher said, "So don't be an asshole. Pony up, OK?"
The guy looked at the mirror again. Nothing in his face.
"I'll call Ms. Pauling's cell," he said. "When, I don't know. I just can't say. It could be days. But I'll get what I can as soon as I can."
Then he slid out of the booth and walked straight to the door. Opened it and made a right turn and was lost to sight. Lauren Pauling breathed out.
"You pushed him," she said. "You were a little rude there."
"But he's going to help."
"Why? What was that ten-sixty-two thing?"
"He was wearing a military police lapel pin. The crossed pistols. MP is his day job. Ten-sixty-two is MP radio code for fellow officer in trouble, requests urgent assistance. So he'll help. He has to. Because if one MP won't help another, who the hell will?"
"Then that's a lucky break. Maybe you won't have to do it all the hard way."
"Maybe. But he's going to be slow. He seemed a little timid. Me, I'd have busted straight into somebody's file cabinet. But he's going to go through channels and ask nicely."
"Maybe that's why he's getting promoted and you didn't."
"A timid guy like that won't get promoted. He's probably terminal at major."
"He's already a Brigadier General," Pauling said. "Actually."
"That guy?" Reacher stared at the door, as if it might have retained an after-image. "He was kind of young, wasn't he?"
"No, you're kind of old," Pauling said. "Everything is comparative. But putting a Brigadier General on it shows how seriously the U.S. is taking this mercenary stuff."
"It shows how seriously we're whitewashing it."
Silence for a moment.
"Mutilation for sport," Pauling said. "Sounds horrible."
"Sure does."
Silence again. The waitress came over and offered refills of coffee. Pauling declined, Reacher accepted. Said, "NYPD found an unexplained body in the river this morning. White male, about forty. Up near the boat basin. Shot once. Lane got a call."
"Taylor?"
"Almost certainly."
"So what next?"
"We work with what we've got," Reacher said. "We adopt the theory that Knight or Hobart came home with a grudge."
"How do we proceed?"
"With hard work," Reacher said. "I'm not going to hold my breath on getting anything from the Pentagon. However many scars and stars he's got, that guy's a bureaucrat at heart."
"Want to talk it through? I was an investigator once. A good one, too. I thought so anyway. Until, you know, what happened."
"Talking won't help. I need to think."
"So think out loud. What doesn't fit? What's out of place? What surprised you in any way at all?"
"The initial takedown. That doesn't work at all."
"What else?"
"Everything. What surprises me is that I can't get anywhere with anything. There's either something wrong with me, or there's something wrong with this whole situation."
"That's too big," Pauling said. "Start small. Name one thing that surprised you."
"Is this what you did? In the FBI? In your brainstorming sessions?"
"Absolutely. Didn't you?"
"I was an MP. I was lucky to find anyone with a brain to storm."
"Seriously. Name one thing that surprised you."
Reacher sipped his coffee. She's right, he thought. There's always something out of context even before you know what the context ought to he.
"Just one thing," Pauling said again. "At random."
Reacher said, "I got out of the black BMW after Burke had switched the bag into the Jaguar and I was surprised how fast the guy was into the driver's seat. I figured I would have time to stroll around the corner and set up a position. But he was right there, practically on top of me. A few seconds, maximum. I barely got a glimpse of him."