The Hard Way

CHAPTER 26

BY THE TIME Reacher got back to the Dakota it was seven o’clock and dawn had given way to full morning. The sky was a pale hard blue. No cloud. Just a beautiful late-summer day in the capital of the world. But inside the fifth floor apartment the air was foul and hot and the drapes were still drawn. Reacher didn’t need to ask whether the phone had rung. Clearly it hadn’t. The tableau was the same as it had been nine hours earlier. Lane upright in his chair. Then Gregory, Groom, Burke, Perez, Addison, Kowalski, all silent, all morose, all arrayed here and there, eyes closed, eyes open, staring into space, breathing low.

Medals not approved.

General discharges.

Bad guys.

Lane turned his head slowly and looked straight at Reacher and asked, “Where the hell have you been?”

“Breakfast,” Reacher said.

“Long breakfast. What was it, five courses at the Four Seasons?”

“A diner,” Reacher said. “Bad choice. Slow service.”

“I pay you to work. I don’t pay you to be out stuffing your face.”

“You don’t pay me at all,” Reacher said. “I haven’t seen dime one yet.”

Lane kept his body facing forward and his head turned ninety degrees to the side. Like a querulous sea bird. His eyes were dark and wet and glittering.

“Is that your problem?” he asked. “Money?”

Reacher said nothing.

“That’s easily solved,” Lane said.

He kept his eyes on Reacher’s face and put his hands on the chair arms, palms down, pale parchment skin ridged with tendons and veins ghostly in the yellow light. He levered himself upright, with an effort, like it was the first time he had moved in nine hours, which it probably was. He stood unsteadily and walked toward the lobby, stiffly, shuffling like he was old and infirm.

“Come,” he said. Like a command. Like the colonel he had been. Reacher followed him to the master bedroom suite. The pencil post bed, the armoire, the desk. The silence. The photograph. Lane opened his closet. The narrower of the two doors. Inside was a shallow recess, and then another door. To the left of the inner door was a security keypad. It was the same type of three-by-three-plus-zero matrix as Lauren Pauling had used at her office. Lane used his left hand. Index finger, curled. Ring finger, straight. Middle finger, straight. Middle finger, curled. 3785, Reacher thought. Dumb or distracted to let me see. The keypad beeped and Lane opened the inner door. Reached inside and pulled a chain. A light came on and showed a chamber maybe six feet by three. It was stacked with cube-shaped bales of something wrapped tight in heavy heat-shrunk plastic. Dust and foreign printing on the plastic. At first Reacher didn’t know what he was looking at.

Then he realized: The printing was French, and it said Banque Centrale.

Central Bank.

Money.

U.S. dollars, bricked and banded and stacked and wrapped. Some cubes were neat and intact. One was torn open and spilling bricks. The floor was littered with empty plastic wrap. It was the kind of thick plastic that would take real effort to tear. You would have to jam a thumbnail through and hook your fingers in the hole and really strain. It would stretch. It would part reluctantly.

Lane bent at the waist and dragged the open bale out into the bedroom. Then he lifted it and swung it through a small arc and let it fall on the floor near Reacher’s feet. It skidded on the shiny hardwood and two slim bricks of cash fell out.

“There you go,” Lane said. “Dime one.”

Reacher said nothing.

“Pick it up,” Lane said. “It’s yours.”

Reacher said nothing. Just moved away to the door.

“Take it,” Lane said.

Reacher stood still.

Lane bent down again and picked up a spilled brick. He hefted it in his hand. Ten thousand dollars. A hundred hundreds.

“Take it,” he said again.

Reacher said, “We’ll talk about a fee if I get a result.”

“Take it!” Lane screamed. Then he hurled the brick straight at Reacher’s chest. It struck above the breastbone, dense, surprisingly heavy. It bounced off and hit the floor. Lane picked up the other loose brick and threw it. It hit the same spot.

“Take it!” he screamed.

Then he bent down and plunged his hands into the plastic and started hauling out one brick after another. He threw them wildly, without pausing, without straightening, without looking, without aiming. They hit Reacher in the legs, in the stomach, in the chest, in the head. Wild random salvos, ten thousand dollars at a time. A torrent. Real agony in the force of the throws. Then there were tears streaming down Lane’s face and he was screaming uncontrollably, panting, sobbing, gasping, punctuating each wild throw with: Take it! Take it! Then: Get her back! Get her back! Get her back! Then: Please! Please! There was rage and pain and hurt and fear and anger and loss in every desperate yelp.

Reacher stood there smarting slightly from the multiple impacts, with hundreds of thousands of dollars littered at his feet, and he thought: Nobody’s that good of an actor.

He thought: This time it’s real.