The Hard Way

CHAPTER 55

“TAYLOR HAD A partner,” Reacher said. “Obviously. He had to, because of the accent thing again. At first I thought it might be the guy in the river. Like you said, I thought maybe they fell out afterward. Or that Taylor got greedy and wanted the whole nine yards for himself. But that won’t work now. The guy in the river was just a regular New York corpse. An unrelated homicide. He was in Rikers at the relevant time. So, I don’t know who made the phone calls. That’s why it’s only a partial theory.”

“Lane will want to know who the partner was. He won’t settle for half a loaf.”

“You bet your ass he won’t.”

“He’s not going to pay.”

“He’ll pay part. We’ll get the rest later. When we tell him who the partner was.”

“How do we find out who the partner was?”

“The only sure way is to find Taylor and ask him.”

“Ask him?”

“Make him tell us.”

“In England?”

“If that’s where your Pentagon buddy says he went. I guess he could check for us who Taylor was sitting next to on the flight. There’s a slim chance they flew together.”

“Unlikely.”

“Very. But it’s maybe worth a try.”

So Pauling went through ten more minutes of phone tag at the U.N. and then gave up and left a voice-mail message asking the guy to check whether Taylor had had a traveling companion.

“What now?” she said.

“Wait for your guy to get back to you,” Reacher said. “Then book us a car to the airport and flights to London, if that’s where Taylor went, which it probably is. Tonight’s red-eye, I guess. I’m betting Lane will ask me to go over there. He’ll want me to do the advance work. Then he’ll bring his whole crew over for the kill. And we’ll deal with them there.”

Pauling looked up. “That’s why you promised no cop or prosecutor in America is going to think twice.”

Reacher nodded. “But their opposite numbers in England are going to get pretty uptight. That’s for damn sure.”

Reacher put Patti Joseph’s photographs back in their envelope and jammed it in the front pocket of his shirt. Kissed Pauling on the sidewalk and headed for the subway. He was outside the Dakota before five in the afternoon.

The name. Tomorrow.

Mission accomplished.

But he didn’t go inside. Instead he walked straight ahead and crossed Central Park West and went in through the gate to Strawberry Field. The John Lennon memorial, in the park. Near where Lennon was killed. Like most guys his age Reacher felt that The Beatles were part of his life. They were its soundtrack, its background. Maybe that was why he liked English people.

Maybe that was why he didn’t want to do what he was about to do.

He patted his shirt pocket and felt the photographs and ran through the narrative one more time the same way Pauling had. But there was no doubt about it. Taylor was the bad guy. No question. Reacher himself was an actual eyewitness. First the Mercedes, then the Jaguar.

No doubt about it.

Maybe there was just no joy in giving one bad guy to another.

But this is for Kate, Reacher thought. For Jade. For Hobart’s money.

Not for Lane.

He took a deep breath and stood for a second with his face tilted up to catch the last of the sun before it fell away behind the buildings to the west. Then he turned around and walked back out of the park.

Edward Lane fanned the two photographs of Taylor quite delicately between his finger and his thumb and asked one simple question: “Why?”

“Greed,” Reacher said. “Or malice, or jealousy, or all of the above.”

“Where is he now?”

“My guess is England. I’ll know soon.”

“How?”

“Sources.”

“You’re good.”

“The best you ever saw.” Or they’d have nailed you in the army.

Lane handed back the photographs and said, “He must have had a partner.”

“Obviously.”

“For the phone calls. Someone with an American accent. Who was it?”

“You’ll have to ask Taylor that.”

“In England?”

“I don’t suppose he’ll be coming back here anytime soon.”

“I want you to find him for me.”

“I want my money.”

Lane nodded. “You’ll get it.”

“I want it now.”

“Ten percent now. The rest when I’m face-to-face with Taylor.”

“Twenty percent now.”

Lane didn’t answer.

Reacher said, “Or I’ll cut my losses and walk away. And you can stroll down to Barnes and Noble and buy a U.K. map and a pin. Or a mirror and a stick.”

Lane said, “Fifteen percent now.”

Reacher said, “Twenty.”

“Seventeen and a half.”

“Twenty. Or I’m out of here.”

“Jesus Christ,” Lane said. “OK, twenty percent now. But you’ll leave now, too. Right now, tonight. You can have one day’s start. That should be enough for a smart boy like you. Then we’ll follow you twenty-four hours later. The seven of us. Me, Gregory, Groom, Burke, Kowalski, Addison, and Perez. That should be enough. You know London?”

“I’ve been there before.”

“We’ll be at the Park Lane Hilton.”

“With the rest of the money?”

“Every penny of it,” Lane said. “I’ll show it to you when you meet us at the hotel and you tell us where Taylor is. I’ll give it to you when I’ve got actual visual contact with him.”

“OK,” Reacher said. “Deal.” And ten minutes later he was back in the subway, heading south, with two hundred thousand U.S. dollars in cash wrapped in a plastic Whole Foods shopping bag.

Reacher met Pauling at her apartment and gave her the bag and said, “Take out what I owe you and hide the rest. It’s enough to get Hobart started with the preliminaries at least.”

Pauling took the bag and held it away from her body like it was contagious. “Is this the African money?”

Reacher nodded. “Direct from Ouagadougou. Via Edward Lane’s closet.”

“It’s dirty.”

“Show me money that isn’t.”

Pauling paused a beat and then opened the bag and peeled off some bills and put them on the kitchen counter. Then she refolded the bag and put it in the oven.

“I don’t have a safe here,” she said.

“The oven will do,” Reacher said. “Just don’t forget and start to cook something.”

She took four bills from the stack on the counter and handed them to him.

“For clothes,” she said. “You’re going to need them. We leave for England tonight.”

“Your guy got back to you?”

She nodded. “Taylor was on British Airways to London less than four hours after Burke put the money in the Jaguar.”

“Alone?”

“Apparently. As far as we can tell. He was seated next to some British woman. Doesn’t mean he didn’t have a partner who checked in separately and sat somewhere else. That would have been a fairly basic precaution. There were sixty-seven unaccompanied adult American males on the flight.”

“Your guy is very thorough.”

“Yes, he is. He got the whole manifest. By fax. Including the baggage manifest. Taylor checked three bags.”

“Overweight charge?”

“No. He was in business class. They might have let it slide.”

Reacher said, “I don’t need four hundred dollars for clothes.”

Pauling said, “You do if you’re traveling with me.”

I was an MP, Reacher had said to Hobart. I’ve done everything before. But he hadn’t. Thirty minutes later he was doing something he had never done in his life. He was buying clothes in a department store. He was in Macy’s on Herald Square, in the men’s department, in front of a cash register, holding a pair of gray pants, a gray jacket, a black T-shirt, a black V-neck sweater, a pair of black socks, and a pair of white boxer shorts. His choices had been limited by the availability of suitable sizes. Inseam, arm length, and chest. He was worried that his brown shoes would be a color clash. Pauling told him to buy new shoes, too. He vetoed that idea. He couldn’t afford them. So she said brown shoes would be just fine with gray pants. He shuffled to the head of the line and paid, three hundred and ninety-six dollars and change, with tax. He showered and dressed back at Pauling’s apartment and took his creased and battered passport and Patti Joseph’s envelope of photographs out of his old pants and shoved them in his new pants. Took his folding toothbrush out of his old shirt pocket and put it in his new jacket pocket. Carried his old clothes down the corridor to the compactor room and dropped them in the garbage chute. Then he waited with Pauling downstairs in the lobby, neither of them saying much, until the car service showed up to take them to the airport.