Lee Child - The Hard Way

He stopped in the living room on his way out. Lane was still in the same chair. Immobile. Still upright. Still composed. Still stoic. Real or phony, either way, it was one hell of a display of endurance. Gregory and Perez and Kowalski were asleep on sofas. Addison was awake but inert. Groom and Burke were drinking their coffee.

“I’m going out,” Reacher said.

“Another walk?” Burke asked, sourly.

“Breakfast,” Reacher said.

The old guy in the lobby was still on duty. Reacher nodded to him and turned right on 72nd and headed for Broadway. Nobody came after him. He found a pay phone and used coins from his pocket and the card from his shoe and dialed Pauling’s cell. He figured she would keep it switched on, top of her nightstand, near her pillow.

She answered on the third ring.

“Hello?” she said.

Rusty voice, not sleepy, just not yet used today. Maybe she lived alone.

Reacher asked, “You heard the name Reacher recently?”

“Should I have?” Pauling asked back.

“It will save us a lot of time if you just say yes. From Anne Lane’s sister Patti, through a cop called Brewer, am I right?”

“Yes,” Pauling said. “Late yesterday.”

“I need an early appointment,” Reacher said.

“You’re Reacher?”

“Yes, I am. Half an hour, at your office?”

“You know where it is?”

“Brewer gave me your card.”

“Half an hour,” Pauling said.

And so half an hour later Reacher was standing on a West 4th Street sidewalk, with a cup of coffee in one hand and a doughnut in the other, watching Lauren Pauling walk toward him.

REACHER KNEW ITwas Lauren Pauling walking toward him because of the way her eyes were fixed on his face. Clearly Brewer had passed on his physical description as well as his name. So Pauling was looking for a tall, wide, blond, untidy man waiting near her office door, and Reacher was the only possibility that morning on West 4th Street.

Pauling herself was an elegant woman of about fifty. Or maybe a little more, in which case she was carrying it well. Brewer had said she’s cute too , and he had been right. She was about an inch taller than average, dressed in a black pencil skirt that fell to her knees. Black hose, black shoes with heels. An emerald green blouse that could have been silk. A rope of big fake pearls at her neck. Hair frosted gold and blonde. It fell in big waves to her shoulders. Green eyes that smiled. A look on her face that said: I’m very pleased to meet you but let’s get straight to the good stuff . Reacher could imagine the kind of team meetings she must have run for the Bureau.

“Jack Reacher, I presume,” she said.

Reacher shoved his doughnut between his teeth and wiped his fingers on his pants and shook her hand. Then he waited at her shoulder as she unlocked her street door. Watched as she deactivated an alarm with a keypad in the lobby. The keypad was a standard three-by-three cluster with the zero alone at the bottom. She was right-handed. She used her middle finger, index finger, ring finger, index finger, without moving her hand much. Brisk, decisive motion. Like typing. Probably 8461 , Reacher thought. Dumb or distracted to let me see. Distracted, probably. She can’t be dumb . But it was the building’s alarm. Not her personal choice of numbers. So she hadn’t given away her home system or her ATM card.

“Follow me,” she said.

Reacher followed her up a narrow staircase to the second floor. He finished his doughnut on the way. She unlocked a door and led him into an office. It was a two-room suite. Waiting room first, and then a back room for her desk and two visitor chairs. Very compact, but the décor was good. Good taste, careful application. Full of the kind of expensive stuff a solo professional leases to create an impression of confidence in a client. A little bigger, it could have been a lawyer’s place, or a cosmetic surgeon’s.

“I spoke to Brewer,” she said. “I called him at home after you called me. I woke him up. He wasn’t very happy about that.”

“I can imagine,” Reacher said.

“He’s curious about your motives.”

Lauren Pauling’s voice was low and husky, like she had been recovering from laryngitis for the last thirty years. Reacher could have sat and listened to it all day long.

“Therefore I’m curious, too,” she said.

She pointed at a leather client chair. Reacher sat down in it. She squeezed sideways around the end of her desk. She was slender and she moved well. She turned her chair to face him. Sat down.

“I’m just looking for information,” Reacher said.

“But why?”

“Let’s see if it leads me to where I need to tell you.”

“Brewer said you were a military cop.”

“Once upon a time.”

“A good one?”

“Is there any other kind?”

Pauling smiled, a little sadly, a little wistfully.

“Then you know you shouldn’t be talking to me,” she said.

“Why not?”

“Because I’m not a reliable witness. I’m hopelessly biased.”

“Why?”

“Think about it,” she said. “Isn’t it obvious? If Edward Lane didn’t kill his wife, then who the hell did? Well, I did, that’s who. Through my own carelessness.”

REACHER MOVED INhis chair and said, “Nobody scores a hundred percent. Not in the real world. Not me, not you, not anybody. So get over it.”

“That’s your response?” Pauling said.

“I probably got more people killed than you ever met. I don’t beat myself up over them. Shit happens.”

Pauling nodded. “It’s the sister. She’s up there in that weird little aerie all the time. She’s like my conscience.”

“I met her,” Reacher said.

“She weighs on my mind.”

“Tell me about the three of clubs,” Reacher said.

Pauling paused, like a gear change.

“We concluded it was meaningless,” she said. “There had been a book or a movie or something where assassins left calling cards. So we tended to get a lot of that at the time. But usually they were picture cards. Mostly aces, mostly spades. There was nothing in the databases about threes. Not much about clubs, either. Then we thought maybe this was one of three connected things, you know, but there was never anything else similar to put with it. We studied symbolism and number theory. We checked with UCLA, talked to the people who study gang culture. Nothing there. We talked to semiotics people at Harvard and Yale and the Smithsonian. We talked to Wesleyan in Connecticut, got some linguistics person working on it. Nothing there. We had a grad student at Columbia working on it. We had people with brains the size of planets working on it. Nothing anywhere. So the three of clubs meant nothing. It was designed to make us chase our tails. Which in itself was a meaningless conclusion. Because what we needed to know was who would want us to chase our tails.”

“Did you look at Lane back then? Even before you heard Patti’s theories?”

Pauling nodded. “We looked at him very carefully, and all his guys. More from the point of view of threat assessment, back then. Like, who knew him? Who knew he had money? Who even knew he had a wife?”

“And?”

“He’s not a very pleasant man. He’s borderline mentally ill. He has a psychotic need to command.”

“Patti Joseph says the same things.”

“She’s right.”

“And you know what?” Reacher said. “His men are mostly a couple of sandwiches short of a picnic, too. They’ve got a psychotic need to be commanded. I’ve talked to some of them. They’re civilians, but they’re holding fast to their old military codes. Like security blankets. Even when they don’t really enjoy the results.”