Ли Чайлд - The Sentinel

Rutherford pointed to the sign. ‘Maybe Sarah was right. Maybe we should have called ahead.’ Then he wound down his window and pressed a call button on a keypad set on a pole.

‘Yes?’ A woman’s voice answered after half a minute. It was quiet and cold like a whisper from a tomb.

‘Good morning. My name’s Rusty Rutherford. Is Mr Klostermann available?’

‘Can you read, Mr Rutherford?’

‘Yes.’

‘Do you have an appointment?’

‘No.’

‘Then you should already know that Mr Klostermann is not available.’

Reacher leaned towards the open window. ‘Actually we don’t know that. Your sign says you need an appointment for an interview. We’re not here for an interview. So we don’t need an appointment.’

There was a pause. ‘Then what are you here for? There are no maintenance visits scheduled for today.’

‘We’re following up on something that will be of interest to Mr Klostermann. Considerable interest. To do with some correspondence from a journalist. About property records for his house.’

‘Please wait.’ A faint electronic buzz told them they hadn’t been disconnected, then after three minutes the woman’s voice returned. ‘Mr Klostermann will see you. When the gate opens drive directly to the front of the house.’

Beyond the gate the site was divided by a line of mature trees. Cypresses and sycamores. The area to the left of them was rough. Unfinished. There were no structures, and no plants taller than stalks of coarse, scrubby grass. The house was to the right. It had an attached two-car garage. Next to that was a covered porch. It was raised up on a stone base and plain white pillars stretched up to support its roof. The rest of the building was finished with wood siding. Long horizontal strips. Painted olive green. There were four windows on the ground floor. Four on the first. Each had shutters. All were open, pinned back against the wall, finished in a darker shade of green. The roof was covered in cream-coloured shingles. A chimney extended six feet above the ridge on the far left.

Rutherford followed the driveway towards the garage, then pulled into a parking area in front of the house and killed the engine. Reacher climbed out. Rutherford followed him and together they climbed the three steps and crossed the porch. Reacher rapped on the door. A woman answered. She was in her late twenties, wearing a knee-length black dress with a white apron. Her blonde hair was tied up in a bun. She was thin, almost malnourished, but she moved with effortless grace, like a ballerina.

‘Please come in,’ she said. Hers was the voice they’d heard on the intercom. Quiet and cold. There was no question about that. ‘Can I offer you gentlemen some refreshment? Iced tea?’

They declined and the woman led the way along a narrow hallway. There was tile on the floor. Family portraits on the walls. Four doors. A pair on each side. Plain, pale wood. No panels. Narrow architraves. The woman paused outside the second door on the right, knocked, then opened it and stood aside to let Rutherford and Reacher enter. She didn’t follow.

There was one person already in the room. A man, slim, rangy, with a mane of white hair. Like Einstein if he’d worked in a bank, Reacher thought. He looked around seventy. Probably born around the time the house was built. Maybe born right there in the house. The man put down his newspaper, hauled himself out of his armchair, and offered his hand.

‘Mr Rutherford, I’m Henry Klostermann. It’s a pleasure to meet you. I know you by reputation, of course. And I don’t envy the position you’re in. I’ve done work for the town in the past. I’m essentially retired now but I make sure my company doesn’t even bid for municipal contracts any more. The penny-pinching. The endless finger-pointing. It drove me up the wall. Made it impossible to do a job properly. I can only imagine what it was like to work there permanently. And your friend?’

‘Reacher.’ Reacher didn’t offer his hand. ‘Jack. I’m Mr Rutherford’s life coach.’

‘Really?’ Klostermann said. ‘How interesting. Now please. Gentlemen. Take a seat.’

Klostermann lowered himself into his chair. Rutherford perched on the edge of a couch with thin tweed cushions and a slender wood frame. Reacher joined him, hoping it would take his weight.

‘Now that you’re here, how can we help each other?’ Klostermann said.

‘Well,’ Rutherford said. ‘As you can imagine, I have some time on my hands right now. I’m trying to put it to good use, following up on things that fell by the wayside when I was working around the clock after the computer system was attacked. One of them is an email. Actually an email and a voicemail. I received them from a journalist. She was asking about property records to do with your home.’

Klostermann steepled his fingers. ‘The journalist. That would be Toni Garza, I presume. You heard she was killed? Such a tragedy.’

‘We heard.’ Rutherford paused. ‘It sounds awful, what happened.’

‘It was. Toni was such a lovely girl. She had so much talent. So much integrity.’

‘You knew her?’

‘Of course I knew her. She was working for me. In fact, it was me who suggested she should contact you. I was hoping you could help with some research she was doing.’

‘To do with your home?’ Reacher said. ‘Its unusual history?’

‘Goodness, no.’ Klostermann frowned. ‘There’s no need. What little there is of that stupid story has been done to death.’

‘Living in a nest of Cold War spies? That sounds like a great story. If the problem is you’re tired of telling it, why not have someone write a book about it? A journalist would be an obvious choice. Specially one with talent and integrity.’

‘It wouldn’t be a book. More like a haiku. There’s not enough material. And this place was hardly a nest. There were only two of them. They were brothers. They only owned the place for eighteen months. And they didn’t even do any spying while they lived here. They wrote a textbook. On math. I wish that was the angle the public latched on to. Imagine if this place was known as the Math House. Then I wouldn’t be swamped with tourists every time a new Bond movie comes out.’

‘If not your house, what was she researching?’

‘Parts of my family history. My father fled to the States from Germany in the 1930s. He could see the way things were going politically, and somehow of all the places in the world he settled here in Tennessee. He founded a business. Started a family. Did all kinds of things. But the details of his early years in the States are sketchy. I felt it was time to find out as much as I could and record it before it was too late. Where he lived before he moved here. When exactly he bought this house. I think someone else owned it between him and the spies, but I’d like to be sure. I want as much detail as I can get. Including the human aspect, you know? There’s a story that when he bought his first house he had no money and credit was hard to come by so he used a painting he brought with him from Germany to back the purchase. These are the little quirks that are so easily lost. I want to know all of them. I want my son to know. And his son, if he ever has one.’

‘That sounds like a wholesome family project,’ Reacher said. ‘But it’s not the kind of thing anyone should get killed over. Are you sure there’s not more to it? Buried treasure? The location of the Lost Ark?’

Klostermann’s face was blank. ‘Someone was killed over my project? Who?’

‘Toni Garza.’

‘No. That’s crazy. Why would her death have anything to do with my project? Toni was a hard worker. She was driven. She wasn’t working for me exclusively. She had a dozen projects on the go. Some she got paid for, like mine. Others she was doing off her own bat. She was digging into all sorts of unsavoury things. She dreamed of becoming an investigative reporter for one of the big papers, although that was always unrealistic. There are so few of those left now.’