The Hard Way

CHAPTER 34

REACHER ASKED, “FIRST name?”

Pauling said, “Clay. Clay James Hobart.”

Reacher asked, “Address?”

Pauling said, “We’re waiting on an answer from the VA.”

“So let’s hit the phone books again.”

“I recycle my old phone books. I don’t keep an archive. I certainly don’t have anything from five years ago.”

“He might have family here. Who better to come back to?”

There were seven Hobarts in the book, but one of them was a duplicate. A dentist, home and office, different places, different numbers, same guy.

“Call them all,” Reacher said. “Make like a VA administrator with a paperwork glitch.”

Pauling put her desk phone on the speaker and got two answering machines with the first two calls and a false alarm on the third. Some old guy with his own VA benefits got all excited in case they were about to disappear. Pauling calmed him down and he said he had never heard of anyone called Clay James Hobart. The fourth and fifth calls were fruitless, too. The sixth call was to the dentist’s office number. He was on vacation in Antigua. His receptionist said he had no relatives called Clay James. The absolute confidence in her answer made Reacher wonder if she was more than just a receptionist. Although she wasn’t in Antigua with him. Maybe she had just worked for him a long time.

“So what now?” Pauling said.

“We’ll try the first two again later,” Reacher said. “Apart from that, it’s back to growing old together.”

But Pauling’s Pentagon buddy was on some kind of a roll because eleven minutes later her cell buzzed again and the guy came through with more information. Reacher saw Pauling put it all down on a yellow pad in fast scrawled handwriting that he couldn’t read upside down and from a distance. Two pages of notes. It was a long call. So long that when it was over Pauling checked the battery icon on her phone and plugged it into a charger.

“Hobart’s address?” Reacher asked her.

“Not yet,” Pauling said. “The VA is balking. There are confidentiality issues.”

“Where he lives isn’t a medical diagnosis.”

“That’s the point my friend is making.”

“So what did he have for us?”

Pauling flipped back to the first page of her notes.

“Lane is on an official Pentagon shit list,” she said.

“Why?”

“You know what Operation Just Cause was?”

“Panama,” Reacher said. “Against Manuel Noriega. More than fifteen years ago. I was there, briefly.”

“Lane was there, too. He was still in uniform back then. He did very well there. That’s where he made full colonel. Then he went to the Gulf the first time around and then he quit under a bit of a cloud. But not enough of a cloud to stop the Pentagon hiring him on as a private contractor afterward. They sent him to Colombia, because he had a reputation as a Central and South America expert, because of his performance during Just Cause. He took the beginnings of his present crew with him to fight one of the cocaine cartels. He took our government’s money to do it but when he got there he also took the target cartel’s money to go wipe out one of their rival cartels instead. The Pentagon wasn’t all that upset because one cartel is as bad as another to them, but they never really trusted Lane afterward and never hired him again.”

“His guys said they’d been to Iraq and Afghanistan.”

Pauling nodded. “After the Twin Towers all kinds of people went all kinds of places. Including Lane’s crew. But only as subcontractors. In other words the Pentagon hired someone they trusted and that someone laid off some of the work to Lane.”

“And that was acceptable?”

“Honor was observed. The Pentagon never wrote another check with Lane’s name on it after that first time in Colombia. But later on they needed all the warm bodies they could get, so they looked the other way.”

“He’s been getting steady work,” Reacher said. “Plenty of income. He lives like a king and most of the African money is still in its original wrappers.”

“That just shows you how big this whole racket has gotten. My guy says since Colombia, Lane has been living off the crumbs from other men’s tables. That’s been his only option. Big crumbs at first, but they’re getting smaller. There’s a lot of competition now. Apparently he got rich that one time in Africa, but whatever is left from that payment is basically all the capital he’s got.”

“He makes out like he’s the big dog. He told me he had no rivals or partners.”

“Then he was lying. Or maybe in a sense he was telling the truth. Because he’s at the bottom of the pile. Strictly speaking he has no equals. Only superiors.”

“Was he subcontracting in Burkina Faso, too?” Reacher asked.

“He must have been,” Pauling said. “Otherwise why isn’t he in the records as a principal?”

“Was our government involved there?”

“It’s possible. Certainly my official friend seems a little tense.”

Reacher nodded. “That’s why he’s helping, isn’t it? This is not one MP to another. This is a bureaucracy trying to control the situation. Trying to manage the flow of information. This is someone deciding to feed us stuff privately so we don’t go blundering about and making a lot of noise in public.”

Pauling said nothing. Then her phone went off again. She tried to pick it up with the charger attached but the wire was too short. She unclipped it and answered. Listened for fifteen seconds and turned to a new page in her pad and wrote a dollar sign, and then two numbers, and then six zeroes. She clicked off the phone and spun the pad around so that Reacher could see what she had written.

“Twenty-one million dollars,” she said. “In cash. That’s how rich Lane got in Africa.”

“You were right,” Reacher said. “Big crumbs. Not too shabby for a subcontractor.”

Pauling nodded. “The whole deal was worth a hundred and five million. U.S. dollars in cash from their government’s central reserve. Lane got twenty percent in exchange for supplying half the manpower and agreeing to do most of the work.”

“Beggars can’t be choosers,” Reacher said.

Then he said: “OK.”

“OK what?”

“What’s half of twenty-one?”

“Ten and a half.”

“Exactly. Kate’s ransom was exactly half of the Burkina Faso payment.”

Silence in the room.

“Ten and a half million dollars,” Reacher said. “It always was a weird amount. But now it makes some kind of sense. Lane probably skimmed fifty percent as his profit. So Hobart got home and figured he was entitled to Lane’s share for his suffering.”

“Reasonable,” Pauling said.

“I would have wanted more,” Reacher said. “I would have wanted all of it.”

Pauling slid her fingernail down the fine print on the H page of the phone book and used the speaker to try the first two Hobart numbers again. She got the same two answering machines. She hung up. Her little office went quiet. Then her cell buzzed again. This time she unclipped the charger first and flipped the phone open. Said her name and listened for a moment and then turned to another fresh page in her yellow pad and wrote just three lines.

Then she closed her phone.

“We have his address,” she said.