Lee Child - Night School

His detectives made notes.

Then Griezman said, “And best of all we now have really solid intelligence from the coroner. The perpetrator is average height and skinny. That’s scientific information. And that’s what we’re looking for. Nothing else. Forget the past clients, unless they happen to be average height and skinny. We’re not interested in anyone else. No doubt a waste of time, because no doubt he’s a sailor with back pay, long gone over the ocean, but we have to be seen to do something. But focus. Don’t waste time. Average height, skinny, his prints in her car. Check those boxes. Nothing else. No wild goose chases. Save your energy for the next thing.”

The detectives filed out, and Griezman breathed out, and leaned back in his chair.

–

At that moment the American was in Amsterdam, showering. He had gotten up late. He was in a hotel one street away from prime time. It was small and clean and some of the guests were airline pilots. It was that kind of place. He had been down for coffee and had seen the German papers in the breakfast room. No headlines. They were nowhere. He was safe.

–

At that moment the messenger was in a Toyota pick-up truck, just five miles into three hundred by road. To be followed by four separate airports, and three safe houses. All arduous, but the worst came first. The road was rough. Hard on the truck, and hard on the passenger. It was fatiguing. In places it was barely a road at all. In places it was more like an extinct riverbed. But such was the price of seclusion.

–

The sun rolled west, first lighting up the Delaware coast, and then the eastern shore of Maryland, and then D.C. itself, the city temporarily magnificent in the early light, as if designed specifically for that single moment of the day. Then dawn reached McLean, and the catering truck arrived in the corporate park, with coffee and breakfast. Everyone was awake and waiting. Landry and Vanderbilt and Neagley were quartered in the second of the three buildings on the Educational Solutions campus. Same deal, beds where desks had been. The NSC guys played team tag out of the third building, always one on duty, always one asleep.

White said, “All but ten of the programmers are either back in the States already or ticketed en route. The missing ten are expats. They live in Europe and Asia. One of them lives right there in Hamburg.”

“Congratulations,” Reacher said. “You cracked the case.”

“It’s a question of priority order. Is an expat more likely to be a bad guy or not? Should we look at them first or second?”

“Who is the guy in Hamburg?”

“We have a photograph. He’s a counterculture guy. Into computers early. He says sooner or later they’ll make the world more democratic. Which means he steals and breaks things and calls it politics, not crime. Or performance art.”

Vanderbilt dug out the picture. It was a head and shoulders shot at the top left of a page torn out of a magazine. An opinion piece, in what felt like an underground journal. The photograph was of a skinny white guy with a huge shock of hair. Like he had his finger in an outlet. Part mad professor, part merry prankster. He was forty years old.

White said, “The Hamburg head of station did a little walking surveillance. The guy isn’t home right now.”

Reacher said, “If he lives there, why did he schedule the first rendezvous while the convention was in town? That’s a busy week. And there are folks who know him. They might notice. Better to do it before or after.”

“Therefore in your opinion the timing proves it was a visitor to the convention.”

“In my opinion this whole thing is Alice in Wonderland.”

“As of now it’s all we’ve got.”

Reacher said, “How far do these messengers travel?”

“Not as far as here. Not yet. Not as far as we know. But they go all through Western Europe, and Scandinavia, and North Africa. And the Middle East, of course.”

“So the best you can do is keep track of the programmers who made it home, and wait for one of them to go back again for the second rendezvous. For the yes or no answer. But not necessarily to Hamburg. Your theory says Hamburg was convenient the first time around because of the convention. Therefore somewhere else might be more convenient the second time around. Paris, or London. Or Marrakesh. Your theory makes no prediction as to location.”

“We’ll know what ticket the guy buys. We’ll know where he’s headed.”

“He’ll buy at the last minute.”

“We’ll still know what plane he gets on.”

“But too late. What are you going to do then? Get the next flight out and arrive four hours after the deal is done?”

“You’re a real ray of sunshine, you know that?”

“Your theory says at the same time the messenger will also be moving. Toward the same destination.”

“We don’t know what name he’ll be using or where he’ll be coming from. Or what passport he’ll be using. Pakistani, possibly. Or British. Or French. Too many variables. We looked back two days before the first rendezvous, and there were five hundred plausible contenders through the Hamburg airport alone. We can’t tell one from the other on paper. We wouldn’t know who to watch.”

“Drink more coffee,” Reacher said. “That usually fixes things up.”

–

In Hamburg it was lunch time, and Chief of Detectives Griezman was minutes away from a fine spread in a cellar restaurant not far from his office. But first he had work to finish. Part of his role as chief was to pass on intelligence to those who needed it. Like an editor, or a curator. Someone had to be responsible. Someone’s fat ass had to get fired if the dots didn’t join up afterward. That’s why he got the big bucks, as they said on the television.

Naturally he tended toward caution. Better safe than sorry. Practically everything got sent somewhere. Before lunch every day. He scanned carbons and Xeroxes and made separate labeled piles, for this agency and that. His secretary had them biked out, while he was eating.

Near the top of the pile was another report from the prostitute investigation. Among the names gathered during the door-to-door inquiries in her street were a U.S. Army major and a noncommissioned officer who claimed to be there for the purposes of tourism. The reporting officer had followed up by checking with border control records at the airport. He had discovered both Americans had indeed arrived that morning, as claimed. Therefore both could be eliminated as suspects, but the reporting officer wished to point out they didn’t look like tourists.

Better safe than sorry. Griezman tossed the report into the space labeled U.S. Army Command HQ Stuttgart, where it was so far the only entry of the day.

Then he read a routine one-paragraph cover-your-ass statement from the uniformed branch. It said several days ago an individual member of the public had contacted them by telephone to report that in the late afternoon he had seen an American in conversation with a dark-skinned man probably from the Middle East, in a bar just out from downtown. The member of the public further claimed the dark-skinned man was acting in an agitated manner, no doubt due to life or death secrets related to regional unrest due to historic inequities. But local officers were quick to advise that the informant in question was a known paranoid and fanatic, known for making frequent phone calls of similar doomsday content, and anyway the Middle Easterner was entitled to act in an agitated manner, because it was a hardcore bar, and his presence would not have been welcomed or long tolerated. All that said, the matter was still considered worthy of recording.

Therefore worthy of passing on up the chain, Griezman decided. Two could play the cover-your-ass game. But passing on to where? The American consulate, of course. Partly as a tweak about the bullying behavior. Why would an American invite an Arab to a bar like that? The invitation certainly couldn’t have been the other way around. It couldn’t have been the Middle Easterner’s first choice of venue. What had been the purpose?