Lee Child - The Hard Way

“North,” he said. “Which way is north?”

“North? North is behind us,” she said. “Go around the traffic circle.”

Hyde Park Corner . He blew through two red lights and swerved the car like a dodgem from one lane to another. Came all the way around and back onto Park Lane in the other direction doing more than sixty miles an hour. Practically on two wheels.

“Where now?” he said.

“What the hell is going on?”

“Just get me out of town.”

“I don’t know how.”

“Use the atlas. There’s a city plan.”

Reacher dodged buses and taxis. Pauling turned pages, frantically.

“Go straight,” she said.

“Is that north?”

“It’ll get us there.”

They made it through Marble Arch with the engine screaming. They got green lights all the way past the Marylebone Road. They made it into Maida Vale. Then Reacher slowed a little. Breathed out for what felt like the first time in half an hour.

“Where next?”

“Reacher, what happened?”

“Just give me directions.”

“Make a right onto St. John’s Wood Road,” Pauling said. “That will take us back to Regent’s Park. Then make a left and go out the same way we came in. And please tell me exactly what the hell is going on.”

“I made a mistake,” Reacher said. “Remember I told you I couldn’t shake the feeling I was making a bad mistake? Well, I was wrong. It wasn’t a bad mistake. It was a catastrophic mistake. It was the biggest single mistake ever made in the history of the cosmos.”

“What mistake?”

“Tell me about the photographs in your apartment.”

“What about them?”

“Nieces and nephews, right?”

“Lots of them,” Pauling said.

“You know them well?”

“Well enough.”

“Spend time with them?”

“Plenty.”

“Tell me about their favorite toys.”

“Their toys? I don’t really know about their toys. I can’t keep up. X-boxes, video games, whatever. There’s always something new.”

“Not the new stuff. Their old favorites. Tell me about their favorite old toys. What would they have run into a fire to save? When they were eight years old?”

“When they were eight years old? I guess a teddy bear or a doll. Something they’d had since they were tiny.”

“Exactly,” Reacher said. “Something comforting and familiar. Something they loved. The kind of thing they would want to take on a journey. Like the family next to me in the lobby just now. The mother got them all out of the suitcase to quiet them down.”

“So?”

“What did those things look like?”

“Like bears and dolls, I guess.”

“No, later. When the kids were eight years old.”

“When they were eight? They’d had them forever by then. They looked like crap.”

Reacher nodded at the wheel. “The bears all worn, with the stuffing out? The dolls all chipped, with the arms off?”

“Yes, like that. All kids have toys like that.”

“Jade didn’t. That’s precisely what was missing from her room. There were new bears and new dolls. Recent things she hadn’t taken to. But there were no old favorites there.”

“What are you saying?”

“I’m saying that if Jade had been kidnapped on the way to Bloomingdale’s on a normal everyday morning I would have found all her favorite old toys still in her room afterward. But I didn’t.”

“But what does that mean?”

“It means Jade knew she was leaving. It means she packed.”

Reacher made the left at Regent’s Park and headed north, toward the M-1, which would carry them all the way back to the M-25 beltway. After the turn he drove on a little more sedately. He didn’t want to get arrested by any English traffic cops. He didn’t have time for that. He figured he was right then about two hours ahead of Edward Lane. It would take an hour for Lane to realize he had been ditched, and then it would take at least another hour for him to get hold of a car and organize a pursuit. So, two hours. Reacher would have liked more, but he figured two hours might be enough.

Might be.

Pauling said, “Jade packed?”

“Kate packed, too,” Reacher said.

“What did Kate pack?”

“Just one thing. But her most precious thing. Her best memory. The photograph with her daughter. From the bedroom. One of the most beautiful photographs I’ve ever seen.”

Pauling paused a beat.

“But you saw it,” she said. “She didn’t take it.”

Reacher shook his head. “I saw a photocopy. From Staples, color digital, laser, two bucks a sheet. Brought home and slipped into the frame. It was very good, but not quite good enough. A little vivid in the colors, a little plastic in the contours.”

“But who packs for a kidnap? I mean, who the hell gets the chance?”

“They weren’t kidnapped,” Reacher said. “That’s the thing. They were rescued. They were liberated. They were set free. They’re alive somewhere. Alive and well and happy. A little tense, maybe. But free as birds.”

They drove on, slow and steady, through the northern reaches of London, through Finchley and Swiss Cottage, toward Hendon.

“Kate believed Dee Marie,” Reacher said. “That’s what happened. Out there in the Hamptons. Dee Marie told her about Anne, and warned her, and Kate believed her. Like Patti Joseph said, there was something about the story and something about her husband that made Kate believe. Maybe she was already feeling the same kind of things that Anne had felt five years before. Maybe she was already planning to go down the same road.”

Pauling said, “You know what this means?”

“Of course I do.”

“Taylor helped them.”

“Of course he did.”

“He rescued them, and he hid them, and he sheltered them, and he risked his life for them. He’s the good guy, not the bad guy.”

Reacher nodded. “And I just told Lane where he is.”

They made it through Hendon and negotiated their last London traffic circle and joined the M-1 motorway at its southern tip. Reacher hit the gas and forced the little Mini up to ninety-five miles an hour.

Pauling said, “What about the money?”

“Alimony,” Reacher said. “It was the only way Kate was ever going to get any. We thought it was half of the Burkina Faso payment, and it was, but in Kate’s eyes it was also half of their community property. Half of Lane’s capital. She was entitled to it. She probably put money in, way back. That’s what Lane seems to want his wives for. Apart from their trophy status.”

“Hell of a plan,” Pauling said.

“They probably thought it was the only way. And they were probably right.”

“But they made mistakes.”

“They sure did. If you really want to disappear, you take nothing with you. Absolutely nothing at all. It’s fatal.”

“Who helped Taylor?”

“Nobody.”

“He had an American partner. On the phone.”

“That was Kate herself. You were half-right, days ago. It was a woman using that machine. But not Dee Marie. It was Kate herself. It must have been. They were a team. They collaborated. She did all the talking, because Taylor couldn’t. Not easy for her. Every time Lane wanted to hear her voice for a proof of life she had to pull the machine off the mouthpiece and then put it back on again.”

“Did you really tell Lane where Taylor is?”

“As good as. I didn’t say Bishops Pargeter. I stopped myself just in time. I said Fenchurch Saint Mary instead. But that’s close. And I had already said Norfolk. I had already said thirty miles from Norwich. And I had already said Grange Farm. He’ll be able to work it out. Two minutes, with the right map.”

“He’s way behind us.”