Lee Child - The Hard Way

The old man turned to Pauling and asked, “Was my information helpful?”

“Maybe,” Pauling said. “But it didn’t add anything.”

“You already knew about the man who couldn’t talk?”

Pauling nodded.

“Then I’m sorry,” the old man said. “You may keep the chair.”

“I’m sick of carrying it around,” Reacher said.

The old man inclined his head. “As I thought. In which case, feel free to leave it here.”

Pauling led Reacher out to the Bowery sidewalk and the last he saw of the chair was a young guy who could have been a grandson hoisting it up on a pole and hanging it back on the wall next to its two fellows.

“The hard way,” Pauling said.

“Makes no sense,” Reacher said. “Why are they sending the guy that can’t speak to meet with everyone?”

“There must be something even more distinctive about the other one.”

“I hate to think what that might be.”

“Lane abandoned those two guys. So why are you helping him?”

“I’m not helping him. This is for Kate and the kid now.”

“They’re dead. You said so yourself.”

“Then they need a story. An explanation. The who, the where, the why. Everyone needs to know what happened to them. They shouldn’t be allowed to just go , quietly. Someone needs to stand up for them.”

“And that’s you?”

“I play the hand I’m dealt. No use whining about it.”

“And?”

“And they need to be avenged, Pauling. Because it wasn’t their fight. It wasn’t even remotely Jade’s fight, was it? If Hobart or Knight or whichever it was had come after Lane directly, maybe I’d have been on the sidelines cheering him on. But he didn’t. He came after Kate and Jade. And two wrongs don’t make a right.”

“Neither do three wrongs.”

“In this case they do,” Reacher said.

“You never even saw Kate or Jade.”

“I saw their pictures. That was enough.”

“I wouldn’t want you mad at me,” Pauling said.

“No,” Reacher said back. “You wouldn’t.”

They walked north toward Houston Street without any clear idea of where they were going next and on the way Pauling’s cell phone must have vibrated because she pulled it out of her pocket before Reacher heard it ring. Silent cell phones made Reacher nervous. He came from a world where a sudden dive for a pocket was more likely to mean a gun than a phone. Every time it happened he had to endure a little burst of unrequited adrenaline.

Pauling stopped on the sidewalk and said her name loudly over the traffic noise and then listened for a minute. Said thanks and snapped the phone shut. Turned to Reacher and smiled.

“My Pentagon buddy,” she said. “Some solid information. Maybe he busted into someone’s file cabinet after all.”

“Did he get a name for us?” Reacher asked.

“Not yet. But he has a location. It was Burkina Faso. You ever been there?”

“I’ve never been anywhere in Africa.”

“It used to be called Upper Volta. It’s an ex-French colony. About the size of Colorado, population thirteen million, with a GDP about a quarter of what Bill Gates is worth.”

“But with enough spare cash to hire Lane’s crew.”

“Not according to my guy,” Pauling said. “That’s the weird thing. It’s where Knight and Hobart were captured, but there’s no record of their government contracting with Lane.”

“Would your guy expect there to be a record?”

“He says there’s always a record somewhere.”

“We need a name,” Reacher said. “That’s all. We don’t need the history of the world.”

“He’s working on it.”

“But not fast enough. And we can’t wait. We need to try something on our own.”

“Like what?”

“Our guy called himself Leroy Clarkson. Maybe it was a private joke or maybe it was something in his subconscious because he lives over there.”

“Near Clarkson or Leroy?”

“Maybe on Hudson or Greenwich.”

“That’s all gentrified now. A guy just back from five years in an African jail couldn’t afford a closet over there.”

“But a guy who was making good money before the five-year hiatus might already own a place over there.”

Pauling nodded. “We should stop by my office. Start with the phone book.”

There were a few Hobarts and half a page of Knights in the Manhattan White Pages but none of them were in the part of the West Village that would have made Leroy Clarkson an obvious pseudonym. Conceivably one of the Knights might have picked Horatio Gansevoort, and one of the Hobarts might have gone by Christopher Perry, but apart from those two the others lived where the streets were numbered or so far east that their subliminal choices would have been Henry Madison or Allen Eldridge. Or Stanton Rivington.

“Too much like daytime TV,” Pauling said.

She had other databases, the kind of things a conscientious PI with old friends in law enforcement and an internet connection can accumulate. But no unexplained Knights or Hobarts cropped up anywhere.

“He’s been away five years,” Pauling said. “Effectively he’ll have dropped out of sight, won’t he? Disconnected phone, unpaid utilities, like that?”

“Probably,” Reacher said. “But not necessarily. These guys are used to sudden travel. They always were, even back in the day. They usually set up automatic payments.”

“His bank account would have emptied out.”

“Depends how much was in it to start with. If he was earning then what the others are earning now he could have paid for plenty of electric bills especially when he’s not even home to turn on the lights.”

“Lane was a much smaller deal five years ago. They all were, before the terrorism gravy train left the station. Real or phony, Anne’s ransom was only a hundred grand, not ten and a half million. Wages will have been in proportion. This guy won’t have been rich.”

Reacher nodded. “He probably rented anyway. Landlord probably threw all his stuff on the sidewalk years ago.”

“So what do we do?”

“I guess we wait,” Reacher said. “For your bureaucratic buddy. Unless we grow old and die first.”

But a minute later Pauling’s phone went off again. This time it was on her desk, out in full view, and its vibration set up a soft mechanical buzz against the wood. She answered it with her name and listened for a minute. Then she closed it slowly and put it back in place.

“We’re not much older,” she said.

“What’s he got?” Reacher asked.

“Hobart,” she said. “It was Hobart who came back alive.”

REACHER ASKED, “FIRSTname?”

Pauling said, “Clay. Clay James Hobart.”

Reacher asked, “Address?”

Pauling said, “We’re waiting on an answer from the VA.”

“So let’s hit the phone books again.”

“I recycle my old phone books. I don’t keep an archive. I certainly don’t have anything from five years ago.”

“He might have family here. Who better to come back to?”

There were seven Hobarts in the book, but one of them was a duplicate. A dentist, home and office, different places, different numbers, same guy.

“Call them all,” Reacher said. “Make like a VA administrator with a paperwork glitch.”

Pauling put her desk phone on the speaker and got two answering machines with the first two calls and a false alarm on the third. Some old guy with his own VA benefits got all excited in case they were about to disappear. Pauling calmed him down and he said he had never heard of anyone called Clay James Hobart. The fourth and fifth calls were fruitless, too. The sixth call was to the dentist’s office number. He was on vacation in Antigua. His receptionist said he had no relatives called Clay James. The absolute confidence in her answer made Reacher wonder if she was more than just a receptionist. Although she wasn’t in Antigua with him. Maybe she had just worked for him a long time.