Night School

Chapter 3

Sinclair sat up straight and hitched closer to the table, as if to emphasize her points, and said, “The Iranian is by all accounts very smart and articulate and sensitive to the nuances of language, and the head of station went over and over it with him, and we firmly believe it was a simple declarative statement. During those fifty minutes the messenger met face to face with an American. Male, because there was no comment about it being a woman, and there would have been, the Iranian says. He’s completely certain of that. During the meeting the American told the messenger he wanted a hundred million dollars. As a price for something. That was clearly the context. But that was the end of the transmission. What American, we don’t know. A hundred million for what, we don’t know. From whom, we don’t know.”

White said, “But a hundred million narrows the field. Even if it’s an opening bid that gets knocked down to fifty, it’s still a good chunk of change. Who has that kind of money? Plenty of people, you would say, but at least you can get them all in one Rolodex.”

“Wrong end of the telescope,” Reacher said. “Better to find the seller than the buyer, surely. What kind of a thing would guys who climb ropes in Yemen pay a hundred million dollars for? And what kind of American in Hamburg has such a thing for sale?”

Waterman said, “A hundred million is a lot of money. That kind of price would worry me a little.”

Sinclair nodded and said, “That kind of price worries us a lot. It sounds deadly serious. It’s more than we ever heard of before. Therefore we’re working every channel we can. All our assets worldwide have been alerted. Hundreds of people are working hard already. But we need more. Your job is to find that American. If he’s still overseas, then CIA has jurisdiction, and Mr. White will lead the effort. If he’s back in the States now, the FBI has jurisdiction and Special Agent Waterman will step up instead. And because statistics tell us the overwhelming majority of Americans in Germany at any one time are U.S. military, we think we might need Major Reacher to be involved with either or both.”

Reacher looked at Waterman, then White, and saw issues in their eyes, and had no doubt they saw the same in his.

Sinclair said, “Staff and supplies will arrive in the morning. You can have anything you want, at any time. But you will talk to no one except me, Mr. Ratcliffe, or the president. This is a quarantined unit. Even if all you want is a box of pencils, you go through me, Mr. Ratcliffe, or the president. Which in practice will be me. Subsequent paperwork will be generated inside the West Wing. You must not be identified personally. Because a hundred million dollars is a lot of money. Government involvement is not impossible. The American could be State Department, or Justice, or in the Pentagon. You might talk to the wrong person by mistake. So talk to no one. That’s rule number two.”

Waterman said, “What was rule number one?”

“Rule number one is the Iranian must not be burned. We must do nothing that could be traced back to him. We have a lot invested in him and we’re going to need him, because we truly have no idea what’s coming next.”

Then she pushed her chair back and stood up and headed for the door. As she left she said, “Remember, hair on fire.”

–

Reacher lay back in his leather chair, and White looked at him and said, “It has to be tanks and planes.”

Reacher said, “Our nearest tanks are a thousand miles from Yemen or Afghanistan, and they take weeks and weeks and thousands of people to move. It would be easier to bring Yemen or Afghanistan to them. Also faster and less obtrusive.”

“Planes, then.”

“I guess a hundred million might get a couple of pilots to come on over to the dark side. Maybe three or four. I doubt if Afghanistan has runways long enough. But maybe Yemen does. So it’s theoretically possible. Except planes are no good to them. They would need hundreds of tons of spare parts and hundreds of engineers and maintenance technicians. And hundreds of hours of training. And we’d find them five minutes later anyway, and destroy them on the ground with missiles. Or maybe we can do it remotely now.”

“Some other military hardware, then.”

“But what? A million rifles at a hundred bucks each? We don’t have that many.”

Waterman said, “It could be a secret, or a code word, or a password, or a formula, or a map or a plan or a diagram, or a list, or the blueprint of all of the world financial system’s computer security, or a commercial recipe, or the sum total of all the bribes required to pass legislation in all fifty states.”

White said, “You think data?”

“What else can be bought and sold unobtrusively and is worth that much? Diamonds, maybe, but they’re in Antwerp, not Hamburg. Drugs, maybe, but no American has a hundred million dollars’ worth ready to ship. That’s South and Central America. And Afghanistan has poppies of its own.”

“What’s the worst case scenario?”

“That’s above my pay grade. Ask Ratcliffe. Or the president.”

“In your own personal opinion?”

“What’s yours?”

“I’m a Middle East specialist. It’s all worst case to me.”

“Smallpox germs,” Waterman said. “That’s my worst case. Or something like that. A plague. A biological weapon. Or Ebola. Or an antidote. Or a vaccine. Which would mean they already have the germs.”

Reacher stared at the ceiling.

Things that might not end well.

You don’t sound happy. But you should.

As long as it takes.

Garber was like a crossword puzzle.

White looked at him and said, “What are you thinking about?”

He said, “The contradiction between rule one and the rest of it. We mustn’t burn the Iranian. Which means we can’t go anywhere near the messenger. We can’t even stake out a location the messenger leads us to. Because we don’t know the messenger exists. Not unless we got an inside whisper.”

“That’s an impediment,” Waterman said. “Not a contradiction. We’ll find a way to work around it. They need that guy.”

“It’s a question of efficiency. They need to know who these guys are ahead of time. They need to trace networks and build databases. Therefore they should focus on the messengers, surely. Verbal questions and verbal answers in their heads, back and forth, continent to continent, question, answer, question, answer. They know everything. They’re like audiotape. They’re worth a hundred inside men. Because they have the big picture. What has the Iranian got? Nothing but four walls in Hamburg and nothing to do.”

“He can’t just be sacrificed.”

“They could pull him out the same moment they hit the messenger. They could give him a house in Florida.”

White said, “The messenger wouldn’t talk. This is a tribal thing, going back a thousand years. They wouldn’t rat each other out. Not after the little we’re allowed to do to them, anyway. So it’s a smart play to keep the inside man where he is. They genuinely don’t know what’s coming. An early hint would be nice. Even part of a clue.”

Reacher said, “Do you know what’s coming?”

“Something unhinged. This is not the same as it used to be.”

“Have you worked with Ratcliffe before? Or Sinclair?”

“Never. Have you?”

Waterman said, “They didn’t choose us because they know us. They chose us because we weren’t in Hamburg at the critical time. We were engaged elsewhere. Therefore we can’t be the wrong people to talk to.”

A quarantined unit, Sinclair had said, and it felt like it. Three guys in a room, shut away from the outside world, because they were all infected, with an alibi.

–

At seven o’clock Reacher got his bags from the car and hauled them up to his bedroom, which was at the far end of three in a line, in a corridor that looked like an office corridor, and might have been the day before. The room was spacious and had a bathroom attached. An executive’s suite. Designed for a desk, not a bed, but it worked.

Eating was a case of firing up the old Caprice and cruising McLean, turning by instinct into the kind of streets that might have the kind of eventual edge-of-town lots that might have the kind of restaurants he was looking for. Not everyone’s choice. His metabolism helped. He saw neon up ahead, and shiny aluminum, next to a gas station, next to a highway ramp. A diner, old enough to be nearly authentic. Some dents and tarnish. Some miles on the clock.

He pulled in and parked, and heaved open the chromium door, and stepped inside. The air was cold and bright with fluorescent light. The first person he saw was a woman he knew. All alone in a booth. From his last-but-one command. The best soldier he had ever worked with. His best friend, possibly, in a guarded way, if friendship was permission to leave things unsaid.

At first he thought it was a not-very-amazing coincidence. It was a small world, and close to the Pentagon it got smaller still. Then he reassessed. She had been his top sergeant during the 110th MP’s glory years. She had played as big a part as anyone, and bigger than some. Bigger than most. Bigger than him, probably.

By being very smart.

Way too smart to be a coincidence.

He stepped up to her table. She didn’t move. She was watching him in the back of an upturned spoon. He slid in opposite and said, “Hello, Neagley.”