The Hard Way Read online

  "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 t
he 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 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."

  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-colored 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 centered 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."