The Hard Way

CHAPTER 27

REACHER WAITED IN the inner hallway and listened to Lane calm down. He heard the sink running in the bathroom. Washing his face, he thought. Cold water. He heard the scrape of paper on hardwood and the quiet crackle of plastic as the bale of cash was reassembled. He heard Lane drag the bale back into the inner closet. He heard the door close, and he heard the keypad beep to confirm it was locked. Then he walked back to the living room. Lane followed a minute later and sat down in his chair, quietly, calmly, like nothing at all had happened, and stared at the silent phone.

It rang just before seven forty-five. Lane snatched it out of the cradle and said “Yes?” in a voice that was a shout strangled to almost nothing by sheer tension. Then his face went blank and he shook his head in impatience and irritation. Wrong caller. He listened for ten seconds more and hung up.

“Who was it?” Gregory asked.

“Just a friend,” Lane said. “A guy I reached out to earlier. He’s had his ear to the ground for me. Cops found a body in the Hudson River this morning. A floater. At the 79th Street boat basin. Unidentified white male, maybe forty years old. Shot once.”

“Taylor?”

“Has to be,” Lane said. “The river is quiet up there. And it’s an easy detour off the West Side Highway, at the boat basin. Ideal for someone heading north.”

Gregory asked: “So what do we do?”

“Now?” Lane said. “Nothing. We wait here. We wait for the right phone call. The one we want.”

It never came. Ten long hours of anticipation ended at eight o’clock in the morning and the phone did not ring. It did not ring at eight-fifteen, or eight-thirty, or eight forty-five. It did not ring at nine o’clock. It was like waiting for a stay of execution from the Governor’s mansion that never came. Reacher thought that a defense team with an innocent client must run through the same range of emotions: puzzlement, anxiety, shock, disbelief, disappointment, hurt, anger, outrage.

Then despair.

The phone did not ring at nine-thirty.

Lane closed his eyes and said, “Not good.”

Nobody replied.

By a quarter to ten in the morning all the resolve had leaked out of Lane’s body like he had accepted something inevitable. He sank into the chair cushion and laid his head back and opened his eyes and stared up at the ceiling.

“It’s over,” he said. “She’s gone.”

Nobody spoke.

“She’s gone,” Lane said again. “Isn’t she?”

Nobody answered. The room was totally silent. Like a wake, or the bloodstained site of a fatal and tragic accident, or a funeral, or a service of remembrance, or an ER trauma room after a failed operation. Like a heart monitor that had been beeping bravely and resolutely against impossible odds had just abruptly gone quiet.

Flatline.

At ten o’clock in the morning Lane raised his head off the back of the chair and said, “OK.” Then he said it again: “OK.” Then he said, “Now we move on. We do what we have to do. We seek and destroy. As long as it takes. But justice will be done. Our kind of justice. No cops, no lawyers, no trials. No appeals. No process, no prison, no painless lethal injections.”

Nobody spoke.

“For Kate,” Lane said. “And for Taylor.”

Gregory said, “I’m in.”

“All the way,” Groom said.

“Like always,” Burke said.

Perez nodded. “To the death.”

“I’m there,” Addison said.

“I’ll make them wish they had never been born,” Kowalski said.

Reacher checked their faces. Six men, less than a rifle company, but with a whole army’s worth of lethal determination.

“Thank you,” Lane said.

Then he sat forward, newly energized. He turned to face Reacher directly. “Almost the first thing you ever said in this room was that these guys of mine could start a war against them, but first we had to find them. Do you remember that?”

Reacher nodded.

“So find them,” Lane said.

Reacher detoured via the master bedroom and picked up the framed photograph from the desk. The inferior print. The one with Jade in it. He held it carefully so as not to smudge the glass. Looked at it, long and hard. For you, he thought. For both of you. Not for him. Then he put the photograph back and walked quietly out of the apartment.

Seek and destroy.

He started at the same pay phone he had used before. Took the card out of his shoe and dialed Lauren Pauling’s cell. Said, “It’s real this time and they’re not coming back.”

She said, “Can you be at the United Nations in half an hour?”