Lee Child - MatchUp

“Naturally.”

“Stephanie had a good job,” Tina said.

“You’re using the past tense. You’re the one who believed she’d gotten on a yacht with a rich guy?”

“Even if Steph came back today, she wouldn’t get that job back,” Tina said.

“Did you come here to talk to me?”

He was ready to cut to the chase. It had been a very long day, and he wanted to shower, eat, and go to bed.

And he still had to stop by Harper’s room.

“It’s nice to talk to an American man, for a change.”

“Tina, I’m close to thirty years older than you. What do you really want?”

She bit her lip. “You shouldn’t sell yourself short. You’re an attractive guy. But I do have a boyfriend. I came to talk to you about something else.”

He waited.

“You know Stephanie was Jewish?”

He nodded.

“And you know Jews aren’t exactly popular here.”

She said it like some kind of inside scoop.

“That’s been the case, off and on, for thousands of years,” he noted. “This is the Middle East.”

“Here’s what I wondered. What if Stephanie went to the synagogue that’s supposed to be so beautiful, the one that’s closed? Elia something. What if she tried to get in? What if the guards caught her?”

“Tina, I don’t know what made you imagine that scenario. From what I’ve heard, Stephanie was hardly observant. Her family certainly isn’t. Eliyahu Hanavi would be the last thing on her list of sites to visit in Alexandria.”

From the corner of his eye, he noticed a quick movement. He glanced in that direction and caught a glimpse of Stephanie’s other roommate, Jerri. When she realized Hauck had seen her, Jerri moved more into his line of sight and drew her hand across her throat. He guessed she was telling him to get rid of Tina.

That was curious.

It didn’t take long to accomplish the task. Tina ran out of conversational gambits, then offered to take him to a nightclub.

He declined.

Naomi Blum, who ran the Treasury’s antiterrorist desk in D.C., and with whom he was off and on with, would have a chuckle at the thought Tina could tempt him.

“I really want to get to my room,” he said.

“I’ll say good night, then. Give me a call if you have some free time.”

She handed him a card with her number written on it.

“For sure.”

He watched her leave. A young woman with an agenda. He only wished he knew what it was. Then her roommate, another young woman with her own agenda, threw herself into the same red chair Tina had just vacated. Though Jerri had not been exactly friendly or forthcoming at the apartment, he realized she was smarter and tougher than Tina.

“So here’s what you need to know,” Jerri said, not wasting time. “The truth is, Stephanie was a good person. And she knew all about that mapping thing she was doing. She was all over it. She loved it. She loved her job. She was trying to think of a way to keep doing it after her internship was over. Jobs in the archaeological world are hard to come by, and she understood that Egyptians would rather hire Egyptians. Government policy and all. She got that.”

Jerri paused, and Hauck nodded, just to show he was paying attention. If Tina had been all over the place conversationally, Jerri seemed a laser beam.

“I can’t pretend that Steph and I were close friends,” she said. “But I do know that she was having some kind of crisis. She was really worried. And it wasn’t boyfriend crap that was on her mind. It was something much bigger.”

He was an old hand at keeping his reactions private. “Bigger, like artifact smuggling? Or faking antiquities?”

“Bigger, still. She found something.”

“Like?”

“You know her area of expertise,” Jerri said. “What do you think?”

And as quickly as she had started the conversation, Jerri ended it by walking out.

He ordered a bourbon and settled back in his chair to think over what she meant.

His cell phone rang.

“Can you come up to our room, Mr. Hauck?”

Harper sounded upset.

“Tolliver’s too sick for me to leave him, and I have to tell you something. It’s 709.”

“Sure, why not?”

ON HIS WAY UP IN the elevator, he noted that this seemed his evening to receive information from young women.

He knocked at Harper’s door, and she answered it quickly, waving him in.

“How’s your brother?” he asked.

“Not good. He only thought he had a cast-iron stomach. I can’t really do much until the worst of it is over, which I hope will be soon.” She looked both worried and exasperated and didn’t invite him to sit. “Look, I found something at the apartment. I wanted to show you privately.” She dug in her jeans pocket and extracted a Kleenex, unfolded it, and handed Hauck a tiny fragment.

“It looks like part of a tooth.”

“It’s Stephanie’s. She’s dead,” she said in as matter-of-fact a tone as if she was making a bank deposit. “I felt a tiny buzz from it in the apartment. It was between the stove and the refrigerator, not even visible until I leaned down and looked. I don’t think she was murdered there. It came to the apartment some other way. Maybe on someone’s shoe.”

“Surely the Egyptian police searched the place and tested for blood?” He was thinking out loud, and he wasn’t too surprised when Harper didn’t offer an opinion or comment. “We need to find the rest of the bones. Can you track them with the piece of tooth?”

“You suddenly seem to have a lot more belief in what I do than you did before.”

“You’ve earned it,” he said.

“Tooth is not bone, but it turns out it’s close enough,” she said. “I’ve never tracked a body that way. But I could try.”

He shook his head, placing the wrapped-up tooth fragment in his shirt pocket. “You’re quite the surprising gal.”

“I am what I am.” She shrugged. “But thanks. Now let me get back to Mt. Vesuvius in the bathroom.”

“Be my guest.”

Back in his room, Hauck spent the rest of the evening studying Nabila’s file. Something didn’t sit right. Poor Stephanie. He looked over her photo again.

Was she dead?

Jerri said she had found something.

Something big.

You know her area of expertise.

Electromagnetic cartography, he read from the file.

She could find what was under the ground.

Unable to rest, he threw on a jacket and took a taxi back to Stephanie’s apartment building.

“You remember me, I represent the family,” he said to the man in the lobby. He showed him Nabila’s card with a two-hundred-Egyptian-pound note wrapped around it. “I want to check out her car.”

“I go on break.” The guard looked through a cabinet, taking the card and cash.

He handed Hauck a set of car keys.

“In twenty minutes.”

HAUCK WOVE THROUGH THE ROWS of cars to the blue fiat Stephanie had leased when she’d arrived in Alexandria. The police had gone over it, Nabila had assured him, but found nothing suspicious. The contents of the car had not been significant, so they’d left them in a shoe box on the front passenger’s seat. He took out his cell phone and switched on the flashlight app.

He looked through what was in there.

A grocery list, some notes on a museum exhibit in town, a city map, tourist brochures, and a small date book filled with appointments, sketches, some restaurant comments, and travel notes she had made on side trips to Cairo, Italy, and Croatia.

Nothing entered on the day she disappeared.