Hard Way (14 page)

"So what does that mean?"

"That he was waiting right there on the street."

"But he wouldn't risk that. If he was Knight or Hobart, Burke would have recognized him in a heartbeat."

"Maybe he was in a doorway."

"Three times running? He used that same fireplug on three separate occasions. At three different times of day. Late night, early morning, rush hour. And he might be memorable, depending on the mutilation."

"The guy I saw wasn't memorable at all. He was just a guy."

"Whatever, it was still hard to find appropriate cover each time. I've done that job. Many times. Including one special night five years ago."

Reacher said, "Give yourself a break."

But he was thinking: Appropriate cover.

He remembered bouncing around in the back of the car listening to the nightmare voice. Remembered thinking: It's right there on the same damn fireplug?

The same damn fireplug.

Appropriate cover.

He put his coffee cup down, gently, slowly, carefully, and then he picked up Pauling's left hand with his right. Brought it to his lips and kissed it tenderly. Her fingers were cool and slim and fragrant. He liked them.

"Thank you," he said. "Thank you very much."

"For what?"

"He used a fireplug three times running. Why? Because a fireplug almost always guarantees a stretch of empty curb, that's why. Because of the parking prohibition. No parking next to a hydrant. Everyone knows that. But he used the same fireplug each time. Why? There are plenty to choose from. There's at least one on every block. So why that one? Because he liked that one, that's why. But why did he like that one? What makes a person like one fireplug more than another?"

"What?"

"Nothing," Reacher said. "They're all the same. They're mass-produced. They're identical. What this guy had was a vantage point that he liked. The vantage point came first, and the fireplug was merely the nearest one to it. The one most visible from it. As you so correctly pointed out, he needed cover that was reliable and unobtrusive, late night, early morning, and rush hour. And potentially he might have needed to be there for extended periods. As it happened Gregory was punctual both times, but he could have hit traffic. And who knew where Burke was going to be when he got the call on the car phone? Who knew how long he might take to get down there? So wherever this guy was waiting, he was comfortable doing it."

"But does this help us?"

"You bet your ass it does. It's the first definite link in the chain. It was a fixed, identifiable location. We need to get down to Sixth Avenue and figure out where it was. Someone might have seen him there. Someone might even know who he is."

CHAPTER 29

REACHER AND PAULING caught a cab on Second Avenue and it took them all the way south to Houston Street and then west to Sixth. They got out on the southeast corner and glanced back at the empty sky where the Twin Towers used to be and then they turned north together into a warm breeze full of trash and grit.

"So show me the famous fireplug," Pauling said.

They walked north until they came to it, right there on the right-hand sidewalk in the middle of the block. Fat, short, squat, upright, chipped dull paint, flanked by two protective metal posts four feet apart. The curb next to it was empty. Every other legal parking spot on the block was taken. Pauling stood near the hydrant and pirouetted a slow circle. Looked east, north, west, south.

"Where would a military mind want to be?" she asked.

Reacher recited, "A soldier knows that a satisfactory observation point provides an unobstructed view to the front and adequate security to the flanks and the rear. He knows it provides protection from the elements and concealment of the observers. He knows it offers a reasonable likelihood of undisturbed occupation for the full duration of the operation."

"What would the duration be?"

"Say an hour maximum, each time."

"How did it work, the first two times?"

"He watched Gregory park, and then he followed him down to Spring Street."

"So he wasn't waiting inside the derelict building?"

"Not if he was working alone."

"But he still used the back door."

"On the second occasion, at least."

"Why not the front door?"

"I don't know."

"Have we definitely decided he was working alone?"

"Only one of them came back alive."

Pauling turned the same slow circle. "So where was his observation point?"

"West of here," Reacher said. "He will have wanted a full-on view."

"Across the street?"

Reacher nodded. "Middle of the block, or not too far north or south of it. Nothing too oblique. Range, maybe up to a hundred feet. Not more.

"He could have used binoculars. Like Patti Joseph does."

"He would still need a good angle. Like Patti has. She's more or less directly across the street."

"So set some limits."

"A maximum forty-five-degree arc. That's twenty-some degrees north to twenty-some degrees south. Maximum radius, about a hundred feet."

Pauling turned to face the curb square-on. She spread her arms out straight and forty-five degrees apart and held her hands flat and upright like mimed karate chops. Scoped out the view. A forty-five-degree bite out of a circle with a radius of a hundred feet gave her an arc of about seventy-eight feet to look at. More than three standard twenty-foot Greenwich Village storefronts, less than four. A total of five establishments to consider. The centre three were possibilities. The one to the north and the one to the south were marginal. Reacher stood directly behind her and looked over her head. Her left hand was pointing at a flower store. Then came his new favourite cafe. Then came a picture framer. Then a double-fronted wine store, wider than the others. Her right hand was pointing at a vitamin shop.

"A flower store would be no good," she said. "It offers a wall behind him and a window in front of him but it wouldn't be open at eleven-forty at night."

Reacher said nothing.

"The wine store was probably open," she said. "But it wouldn't have been at seven in the morning."

Reacher said, "Can't hang around in a flower store or a wine store for an hour at a time. Neither one of them offers a reasonable likelihood of undisturbed occupation for the full duration of the operation."

"Same with all of them, then," she said. "Except the cafe. The cafe would have been open all three times. And you can sit for an hour in a cafe."

"The cafe would have been pretty risky. Three separate lengthy spells, someone would have remembered him. They remembered me after one cup of coffee."

"Were the sidewalks crowded when you were here?"

"Fairly."

"So maybe he was just out on the street. Or in a doorway. In the shadows. He might have risked it. He was on the other side from where the cars were parking."

"No protection from the elements and no concealment. It would have been an uncomfortable hour, three times in a row."

"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 pre-war 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 cafe'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 cafe 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 cafe were three stories of windows filled variously with faded drapes made of red Indian cloth, or macramй 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 cafe 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 macramй."

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 cafe. 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, two 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."