Lee Child: Without Fail

OK, so let’s get serious . She hitched straighter in her chair and quit the government sites and fired up some illicit software that took her straight into the banking industry’s private world. Strictly speaking she shouldn’t be using it for this purpose. Or for any purpose. It was an obvious breach of official protocol. But she didn’t expect to get any comeback. And she did expect to get a result. If UNSUB had even a single bank account anywhere in the fifty states, it would show up. Even a humble little checking account. Even an empty or abandoned account. Plenty of people got by without bank accounts, she knew that, but she felt in her gut UNSUB wouldn’t be one of them. Not somebody who had been a U.S. Army major. With medals.

She entered the Social Security number twice, once in the SSN field and once in the taxpayer ID field. She entered the name. She hit search .

One hundred and eighty miles away, Jack Reacher shivered. Atlantic City in the middle of November wasn’t the warmest spot on earth. Not by any measure. The wind came in off the ocean carrying enough salt to keep everything permanently damp and clammy. It whipped and gusted and blew trash around and flattened his pants against his legs. Five days ago he had been in Los Angeles, and he was pretty sure he should have stayed there. Now he was pretty sure he should go back. Southern California was a very attractive place in November. The air was warm down there, and the ocean breezes were soft balmy caresses instead of endless lashing fusillades of stinging salt cold. He should go back there. He should go somewhere , that was for damn sure.

Or maybe he should stick around like he’d been asked to, and buy a coat.

He had come back east with an old black woman and her brother. He had been hitching rides east out of L.A. in order to take a one-day look at the Mojave Desert. The old couple had picked him up in an ancient Buick Roadmaster. He saw a microphone and a primitive PA system and a boxed Yamaha keyboard among the suitcases in the load space and the old lady told him she was a singer heading for a short residency all the way over in Atlantic City. Told him her brother accompanied her on the keyboard and drove the car, but he wasn’t much of a talker anymore, and he wasn’t much of a driver anymore, and the Roadmaster wasn’t much of a car anymore. It was all true. The old guy was completely silent and they were all in mortal danger several times inside the first five miles. The old lady started singing to calm herself. She gave it a few bars of Dawn Penn’s “You Don’t Love Me” and Reacher immediately decided to go all the way east with her just to hear more. He offered to take over the driving chores. She kept on singing. She had the kind of sweet smoky voice that should have made her a blues superstar long ago, except she was probably in the wrong place too many times and it had never happened for her. The old car had failed power steering to wrestle with and all kinds of ticks and rattles and whines under the hammer-heavy V-8 beat, and at about fifty miles an hour the noises all came together and sounded like a backing track. The radio was weak and picked up an endless succession of local AM stations for about twenty minutes each. The old woman sang along with them and the old guy kept completely quiet and slept most of the way on the backseat. Reacher drove eighteen hours a day for three solid days, and arrived in New Jersey feeling like he’d been on vacation.

The residency was at a fifth-rate lounge eight blocks from the boardwalk, and the manager wasn’t the kind of guy you would necessarily trust to respect a contract. So Reacher made it his business to count the customers and keep a running total of the cash that should show up in the pay envelope at the end of the week. He made it very obvious and watched the manager grow more and more resentful about it. The guy took to making short cryptic phone calls with his hand shielding the receiver and his eyes locked on Reacher’s face. Reacher looked straight back at him with a wintry smile and an unblinking gaze and stayed put. He sat through all three sets two weekend nights running, but then he started to get restless. And cold. The Mamas and the Papas were in his head: I’d be safe and warm, if I was in L.A . So on the Monday morning he was about to change his mind and get back on the road when the old keyboard player walked him back from breakfast and finally broke his silence.

“I want to ask you to stick around,” he said. He pronounced it wanna ax , and there was some kind of hope in the rheumy old eyes. Reacher didn’t answer.

“You don’t stick around, that manager’s going to stiff us for sure,” the old guy said, like getting stiffed for money was something that just happened to musicians, like flat tires and head colds. “But we get paid, we got gas money to head up to New York, maybe get us a gig from B. B. King in Times Square, resurrect our careers. Guy like you could make a big difference in that department, count on it.”

Reacher said nothing.

“Of course, I can see you being worried,” the old guy said. “Management like that, bound to be some unsavory characters lurking in the background.”

Reacher smiled at the subtlety.

“What are you, anyway?” the old guy asked. “Some kind of a boxer?”

“No,” Reacher said. “No kind of a boxer.”

“Wrestler?” the old guy asked. He said it wrassler . “Like on cable television?”

“No.”

“You’re big enough, that’s for damn sure,” the old guy said. “Plenty big enough to help us out, if you wanted to.”

He said it he’p . No front teeth. Reacher said nothing.

“What are you, anyway?” the old guy asked again.

“I was a military cop,” Reacher said. “In the Army, thirteen years.”

“You quit?”

“As near as makes no difference.”

“No jobs for you folks afterward?”

“None that I want,” Reacher said.

“You live in L.A.?”

“I don’t live anywhere,” Reacher said. “I move around.”

“So road folk should stick together,” the old guy said. “Simple as that. Help each other. Keep it a mutual thing.”

He’p each other .

“It’s very cold here,” Reacher said.

“That’s for damn sure,” the old guy said. “But you could buy a coat.”

So he was on a windswept corner with the sea gale flattening his pants against his legs, making a final decision. The highway, or a coat store ? He ran a brief fantasy through his head, La Jolla maybe, a cheap room, warm nights, bright stars, cold beer. Then: the old woman at B. B. King’s new club in New York, some retro-obsessed young A amp;R man stops by, gives her a contract, she makes a CD, she gets a national tour, a sidebar in Rolling Stone , fame, money, a new house. A new car . He turned his back on the highway and hunched against the wind and walked east in search of a clothing store.

On that particular Monday there were nearly twelve thousand FDIC-insured banking organizations licensed and operating inside the United States and between them they carried over a thousand million separate accounts, but only one of them was listed against UNSUB ’s name and Social Security number. It was a simple checking account held at a branch of a regional bank in Arlington, Virginia. M. E. Froelich stared at the branch’s business address in surprise. That’s less than four miles from where I’m sitting right now . She copied the details onto her yellow paper. Picked up her phone and called a senior colleague on the other side of the organization and asked him to contact the bank in question for all the details he could get. Especially a home address. She asked him to be absolutely as fast as possible, but discreet, too. And completely off the record. Then she hung up and waited, anxious and frustrated about being temporarily hands-off. Problem was, the other side of the organization could ask banks discreet questions quite easily, whereas for Froelich to do so herself would be regarded as very odd indeed.