Lee Child: Night School

He stepped over the tangle of legs, and walked into the bar. There was an old guy behind the counter. No customers. The old guy was maybe seventy. Like Ratcliffe. But in much worse shape. He was seamed and lined and gray and stooped.

Reacher said, “You speak English?”

The old guy said, “Yes.”

“I saw you looking out the window.”

“Did you?”

“You knew about those boys out there.”

“What about them?”

“Wanting only German customers in here. You OK with that?”

“I have the right to choose who I serve.”

“Want to serve me?”

“No, but I will, if I must.”

“Your coffee any good?”

“Very good.”

“I don’t want any. All I want is an answer to a question. Something I’ve always been curious about.”

“What is it?”

“How does it feel to lose a war?”

–

They moved on, and gave up five streets later. There were too many plausible locations. Guessing at personal tastes and preferences narrowed the field, but still left multiple options for every scenario. There was no way to predict where the two men would meet.

Reacher said, “We’ll have to do it the other way around. We’ll have to hole up and wait for the messenger to come back, and then follow him out to the rendezvous. And see who he meets with. Which will be very difficult, all things considered. It will take a lot of craft, on these streets. And a lot of people. We’ll need a specialist surveillance team.”

Neagley said, “We can’t anyway. We can’t burn the Iranian.”

“We would stay hands off. And we would wait. As long as it took. All we need now is a look at the guy he’s meeting with. If we know who he is, we can come at him later, and from a different angle. We can fake a line of inquiry that gets to him some other way. Or reverse-engineer a real line of inquiry. In either case there would appear to be no involvement on the part of the messenger. The Iranian’s status wouldn’t change.”

“Does anyone even have specialist surveillance teams anymore?”

“I’m sure CIA does.”

“In every consulate? Still? I doubt it. Plan on you and me only. Which will be very difficult. Like you said. Especially because the apartment building almost certainly has a service entrance. We’ll be split from the start.”

Reacher said, “Maybe Waterman has people.”

“This should be a bigger operation.”

“We can have anything we want. That’s what the man said.”

“But I’m not sure he meant it. He’ll say even watching the apartment is a risk to the Iranian. Which it is. It could be two whole weeks. One slip, or if they see the same guy twice, then the safe house is blown, and they’ll figure out why. Our hands are tied.”

Reacher said nothing.

–

They walked back toward their hotel, and on a street two blocks from it saw four police cruisers parked in a line at the curb, and eight cops in uniform out on their feet, going from building to building, pressing buzzers, talking to people in lobbies, and then leapfrogging ahead to the next address. Door-to-door inquiries. Something bad.

They made to walk on by, but a cop stopped them and asked, in German, “Do you live on this street?”

Reacher said, “Do you speak English?”

The guy said, in English, “Do you live on this street?”

Reacher pointed ahead. “We’re staying at the hotel.”

“How long have you been there?”

“We arrived this morning.”

“Overnight flight?”

“Yes.”

“From America?”

“How could you tell?”

“By your dress, and your manner. What is the purpose of your visit?”

“Tourism.”

The guy said, “Your papers, please.”

Reacher said, “Really?”

“The law in Germany requires you to identify yourselves to the police on request.”

Reacher shrugged and dug in his pocket for his military ID. Easy enough to find. Not much else in there. He handed it over. Neagley did the same. The cop wrote their names in his notebook and passed the cards back, politely.

He said, “Thank you.”

Reacher asked, “What happened?”

“A prostitute was strangled. Before you got here. Have a pleasant day.”

The guy walked on, leaving them alone on the sidewalk.

–

At that moment the American was less than five hundred yards away, renting a car from a small franchise shoehorned into two ground-floor units in a parallel street of low-rise apartments. He wanted to get out of town. Just for a few days. A few hours, even. An immature response, he knew. Like a child. I can’t see you, so you can’t see me . Not that he was worried. Not at all. No fingerprints, no DNA, no cameras. She was only a hooker. They would give up soon. He was sure of that. But in the meantime there was no point in lingering. He would drive to Amsterdam, maybe. And then come back. It was like falling. No way of stopping now.

–

Reacher and Neagley got back to the hotel and the clerk behind the desk told them a gentleman from America called Mr. Waterman had called twice on the phone. Twelve noon in Hamburg. Six o’clock in the morning on the East Coast. Some kind of urgent business. They went up to Neagley’s room, which was closer, and called back from there. Waterman’s guy Landry answered. They were all at work already. Then Waterman himself came on the line and said, “You need to get back here. They just picked up more chatter. They think everything’s changing.”

They took Lufthansa in the early evening, sitting together among mostly young people traveling mostly alone, some of them scruffy, some of them weird, some of them like a postgraduate field trip. The flight got them back to the States two hours after they left Germany, in the middle of the evening, eight hours in the air minus six time zones, and they collected the old Caprice from the short-term garage, and drove it through the dark to McLean, and parked it next to the newer Caprices, which looked like they hadn’t been moved. Next to them were two black vans. They went inside and found everyone including Ratcliffe and Sinclair crammed in the office. Waiting for them. But they hadn’t been waiting long. Rank had its advantages. Ratcliffe said, “You’re right on time. The FAA kept us informed about Lufthansa, and the police kept us informed about the traffic.”

Reacher said, “What have we missed?”

Ratcliffe said, “A piece of the puzzle. What do you know about computers?”

“I saw one once.”

“They all have a thing inside that sets the date and the time. A little circuit. Very basic, very cheap, and developed a very long time ago, back when punch cards were the gold standard and data had to be squeezed into eighty columns only. To save bits they wrote the year as two digits, not four. As in, 1960 was written as 60. 1961 was 61. And so on. They had to save space. All well and good. Except that was then and this is now, and before we know it 1999 is going to change to 2000, and no one knows if the two-digit systems will roll over properly. They might think it’s 1900 again. Or 19,100. Or zero. Or they might freeze solid. There could be catastrophic failures all around the world. We could lose utilities and infrastructure. Cities could go dark. Banks could crash. You could lose all your money in a puff of smoke. Not even smoke.”

Reacher said, “I don’t have any money.”

“But you get the point.”

“Who designed the circuit? What do they say?”

“They’re all either long retired or long dead. And they didn’t expect the programs to last more than a few years anyway. So there’s no documentation. It was just a bunch of geeks standing around a lab bench, trying to figure things out. No one remembers the exact details. No one is smart enough to work it out again backward. And there’s a feeling they might have misunderstood the Gregorian calendar. They might have forgotten 2000 is a leap year. Normally anything divisible by a hundred isn’t. But something divisible by four hundred is. So it’s a real mess.”