Ли Чайлд: The Fourth Man

Lee Childis one of the world’s leading thriller writers. He was born in Coventry, raised in Birmingham, and now lives in New York. It is said one of his novels featuring his hero Jack Reacher is sold somewhere in the world every nine seconds. His books consistently achieve the number-one slot on bestseller lists around the world and have sold over one hundred million copies. Two blockbusting Jack Reacher movies have been made so far. He is the recipient of many awards, most recently the CWA’s Diamond Dagger for a writer of outstanding body of crime fiction, the International Thriller Writers’ ThrillerMaster, and the Theakstons Old Peculier Outstanding Contribution to Crime Fiction Award.

I was walking south, with the traffic, on Fifth Avenue in New York City, on the right-hand sidewalk, on the block before the Empire State, when a complete stranger put her hand on my arm and said, ‘I know who you are.’

I was pretty sure she didn’t. I was pretty sure if I asked, she would say I was a guy about to luck into an unrepeatable financial opportunity. Or meet a tall dark stranger. Or some such advantageous thing. But only if I gave her twenty bucks first. Maybe fifty. That part would be somehow crucial. She was a fine-boned individual, with blonde hair and blue eyes, maybe forty, a little worn down and hard around the edges, wearing a black business suit, gone a little shiny from cleaning, and too warm for the weather. She was carrying a black leather pocketbook, slung over her shoulder. It was bulging with items, some of them heavy.

I said, ‘So who am I?’

‘You’re Jack Reacher,’ she said.

‘Am I?’

‘No middle name. Thirteen years in the military police.’

‘Who are you?’

‘Have you ever been to Australia?’

‘That’s a question, not an answer.’

‘Have you?’

She had been raised in Chicago, I thought, judging by her vowel sounds.

I asked her, ‘Where did you go to college?’

‘Yale,’ she said. ‘Does it matter?’

‘Remember your sophomore year?’

‘I guess.’

‘That was about the last time I went to Australia.’

‘You were still in the army then.’

‘I stopped off on my way back from Korea.’

‘Why?’

‘Vacation,’ I said. ‘It was summertime there, and winter everyplace else.’

‘Not everyplace,’ she said. ‘It’s a hemisphere thing.’

‘A woman was involved. I met her in Bali.’

‘Any problems with your visit?’

‘Who are you?’ I asked her again.

She unslung her bag. Heavy items clicked and shifted. She put her hand inside. Pedestrians flowed around us. Three NYPD cops watched from across the light. She came out with an ID wallet. A gold shield. She was FBI. A special agent. Her name was Cynthia Mitchell.

She said, ‘Would you come downtown and answer a couple of questions?’

‘Why?’

‘International cooperation,’ she said. ‘And it might be in your interest.’

‘How?’

‘Australian law enforcement found a list. There were four people on it, including you. The other three are dead.’

Special Agent Cynthia Mitchell made four cell phone calls from the sidewalk, and as she finished up the last of them a plain black sedan stopped at the kerb next to us. It had steel wheels with hubcaps, and two needle antennas on the roof. Inside it smelled of automotive cleaning products. Mitchell scooted in behind the driver. I sat next to her, behind the empty front passenger seat. The driver was a solid guy in a suit. He took off without a word, heading south with the traffic, towards the blank government buildings way downtown. Mitchell didn’t talk. Instead she worked her phone with her thumbs, doing texts and e-mails.

Twenty minutes later we parked underground and rode upstairs in a slow elevator that smelled of rubber. The guy in the suit peeled off in a different direction, and Mitchell led me onward to a double- wide office furnished as a conference room. It had a long table and leather chairs with slender chrome legs. In one of the chairs was a guy in a blue suit. He was about Mitchell’s own age, maybe forty, with unruly fair hair above an open-air tan, and wide shoulders, and battered hands. Worn down in a different way than Mitchell. Maybe a ballplayer once. Now a federal agent. Which he turned out to be, but not ours.

Mitchell said, ‘This is Pete Peterson from the Australian consulate. He’s their senior counterterrorism guy. His home office found the list. He’s the one with the questions. All we’re doing is helping out.’

Peterson said, ‘We asked all our friends to run some photographs through their facial recognition software and their local databases. Your picture matched both your old army photo, and the photo on your new passport. You haven’t changed much. Our friends in the FBI were good enough to pass on your name. We tried to contact you, but we got nowhere.’

I said, ‘When was this?’

‘A year ago.’

‘I was a hard man to find, a year ago.’

‘Evidently.’

‘The list came with photographs?’

Peterson shook his head.

‘Not with,’ he said. ‘The photographs were the list. That’s all there was. Four photographs in an envelope. Nothing else.’

‘Where?’

‘We got a tip about an address in Sydney. No one was home, but we got a houseful of evidence. It was part of a sophisticated gang operation. Maybe organized crime, maybe terrorism. It’s sometimes hard to tell the difference. Everything in the house was inventoried and studied. The envelope with the photographs seemed to mean nothing. Just four random guys. Definitely no one thought of them as a list of anything. They were filed away.’

‘A year ago?’

‘Three years ago. They seemed to mean nothing, so we didn’t put them on the wires. Not back then.’

‘What changed a year ago?’

‘A year ago we found out we were already a year late. The situation had started to change two years ago. One day we took a routine look at the tracks and traces, and we saw we had gotten three separate pings, from homicide detectives in Sydney, Melbourne and Perth. They were running database searches of their own. Three out of our four photographs had been murdered over the previous twelve months. At which point we mentally turned the envelope into a list of targets. We put all four faces on the global wires. We thought we could get background from the three dead guys, and then maybe use it to save the fourth guy.’

‘It worked,’ I said. ‘Here I am.’

‘We didn’t get much background. We’re hoping you can tell us something.’

‘About what?’

‘Why you’re on the list.’

‘I have no idea. I never went to Australia with three other guys. And when I was there I’m pretty sure I didn’t offend anyone. Not that bad, anyway.’

Peterson ducked away and came back with a briefcase. He laid it on the table. He opened it up. He lifted out a thin khaki file.

‘Not the originals,’ he said. ‘Very high quality reproductions.’

In the file were ten sheets of glossy paper. Photographs of the photographs, plus their envelope, in each case front and back. The Australian lab had done an outstanding job. The images were grainless and highly detailed. Every fleck and fibre was visible. It was immediately obvious the original photographs were not really photographs at all. They were Xerox copies of photographs. Pretty good, but a little dull and sooty. Mine was an army photograph. Some new ID requirement, maybe five years before the end. The good old days.

The other three faces I had never seen before. But their pictures resembled mine, in terms of their rigid postures, and their impatient glares. All some kind of official ID.