Lee Child - The Hard Way

“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 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 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?”

REACHER COULDN’T GETclose 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 résumé-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.”