by Lee Child
ground. A hundred million is a weird price point.”
Reacher nodded. “I said the same thing to White. He thought tanks and planes.”
“What hardware would they want from us? Give me one good example. Something designed for use in the field, obviously, in the heat of battle, by an average infantry soldier. Because that’s the standard they must be aiming for. Something simple, rugged, and reliable. Something with a big red switch. And a big yellow arrow pointing forward. Because they don’t have specialist training or a regiment of engineers.”
“There are lots of things.”
“I agree. Man-portable shoulder-launch ground-to-air missiles would be useful. They could bring down civilian airliners. Over cities. Except they already have thousands. We gave thousands to the rebels and the Soviets left thousands behind. And now the new Russia is busy selling the thousands they brought back. And if that’s not enough they can get cheap knock-offs from China. Or North Korea. It would be physically impossible to spend a hundred million dollars on shoulder-launch missiles. They’re too common. Too cheap. It’s Economics 101. It would be like spending a hundred million dollars on dirt.”
“What, then?”
“There’s nothing. We have no theory.”
Ten o’clock in the evening, in McLean, Virginia.
—
Which was half past seven the next morning in Jalalabad, Afghanistan. The messenger was once again waiting in the antechamber. Early sun was coming in a high window, catching motes of dust, and stirring newborn flies. Tea was brewing in the kitchen.
Eventually the messenger was led to the same small hot room. It too had a high window, with a shaft of morning sun, and dancing dust, and waking flies. The same two men sat below the sunbeam, on the same two pillows. Both bearded, one short and fat, one tall and lean, both in the same plain white robes and the same plain white turbans.
The tall man said, “You are to leave today with our answer.”
The messenger inclined his head, respectfully.
The tall man said, “The way of the world is to bargain. But we’re not buying camels. So our answer is simple.”
The messenger inclined his head again, and turned it a little, as if presenting his ear.
The tall man said, “Tell the American we will pay his price.”
Chapter 8
Four hours later it was eight o’clock in the morning in Hamburg, Germany, and the city’s chief medical examiner was starting work at the central morgue. He had completed his autopsy late the previous evening. Unpaid overtime, but homicide was rare, and careers could be built. Now he wanted to review his notes before presenting his conclusions.
The victim was a tall pale-skinned Caucasian female. According to her papers she had been thirty-six years and eight months old at the time of her death. Which was consistent with the physical evidence. The woman had been in good shape. A dieter, judging by her low body fat. A gym member, judging by her muscle tone. She had eaten a couscous salad about six hours prior to death, and had swallowed semen about an hour before. Then she had been strangled from behind, savagely, by a right-handed assailant. The tissue damage was marginally greater on the right side, indicating stronger fingers.
The victim’s pale skin had permitted perimortem bruising in other locations. Not dramatic, but well defined. In particular there were incipient contusions on the backs of her elbows, from her assailant’s knees. He had pinned her down, straddling her, riding her like a pony. And her buttocks were faintly bruised, from the pressure of his. He was bony, in the medical examiner’s opinion. Strong, but wiry. Sharp-edged, in the hands, and at the knees. A skinny-ass dude, they would say on the television. Possibly charged with energy, possibly nervous in his manner, and capable of violent outbursts.
A picture was emerging.
And best of all, the linear measurement between the bruises on the victim’s buttocks and on her elbows was self-evidently the precise distance between the sharp base of the assailant’s pelvic girdle and his kneecaps. Which after standard deductions for the joints in question gave the precise length of his femur. And the length of the femur was considered an infallible guide to a person’s height.
The assailant was one meter seventy-three tall. In American, five feet eight inches. And American had to be quoted, because the victim was a prostitute. GIs still had money to spend. But either way, not a dwarf and not a giant.
The medical examiner clipped a personal note to the back of the file. Not standard practice, but he was a little caught up in the excitement. The note said in his opinion the guilty party was a right-handed man of average height, probably less than average weight, with pronounced bone structure, and a strong physique, but wiry rather than muscular. Like a long-distance runner, perhaps.
Then the medical examiner sealed the file in an envelope, and asked for it to be biked immediately to the chief of detectives, in the city’s police department.
—
The chief of detectives was not thrilled to get it. Not at first. He got more excited later. His name was Griezman. He was considered successful. His department’s ninety-percent record was impressive. But on this occasion Griezman didn’t want impressive. He wanted a short investigation, and then he wanted the case far away in the distance, on the other side of the divide, firmly in the ten percent of cold and forgotten failures.
He had read the notes from his detectives. One said normally the victim drove from her home to the hotel, late in the evening, and parked in the garage, and worked the bar. But that night no one had seen her arrive. Normally the client would use his own hotel room. Normally she would leave in the middle of the night, or sometimes early the next morning. The bartenders and the housekeeping staff might be able to generate a list of men she had been seen with.
Another note said it was unusual for her to entertain clients at her own apartment. Unusual for hotel hookers generally. Perhaps the client had been a repeat customer. Known and trusted. In which case close investigation of regular clients might pay dividends. Over the past year or two, perhaps. It was assumed the relationship had begun in the bar. Perhaps the hotel workers would remember the original meeting. Most of them had been there a very long time.
A third note said she was extremely expensive.
Griezman closed his eyes.
He already knew that. And he knew she worked the bar. The notes were wrong in some respects. It wasn’t unusual for her to use her own apartment. Not at all. Sometimes quite naturally she would meet people in the bar who weren’t staying in the hotel. Local gentlemen, perhaps unwinding after a hard day at the office. With homes of their own nearby, but of course those could not be used. Because of wives, and families, and so on.
Local gentlemen, like himself.
He had been her client. Almost a year earlier. Three times. OK, four. All at her place. The first time from the hotel, indeed. What’s your room number? I’m not actually staying here. I’m just here for a drink. They had gone in separate cars. He had an insurance policy, recently matured and paid out, with a bonus, all of it supposed to go in the savings account. For the children. And now she was dead. Murdered. He would be on the list of men she had been seen with. Close investigation would be disastrous. Someone would remember. He would be fired, obviously. And divorced, of course. And shamed.
He opened the medical examiner’s envelope. He read the cold, hard facts. He knew that neck. It was long and slender and exquisitely pale. He knew she liked couscous. He knew she swallowed.
He turned the last page and saw the personal note. Right-handed, average height, underweight, pronounced bone structure, wiry rather than muscular.
Like a long-distance runner.
Griezman smiled.
He was two meters tall, and weighed 136 kilograms. Six feet six inches and three hundred pounds, in American. Most of it fat. He ate sausage and mashed potatoes for breakfast. The last time he had seen a bone had been on an X-ray.
Nothing like a long-distance runner.
He told his secretary to call a meeting. His team came in. His detectives. He said, “It’s time to set some new parameters. Let’s say the victim drove to the hotel, but got picked up before she got in the door. A chance meeting in the garage itself, maybe. Possibly a regular client. Possibly a long-time-no-see thing. Which tells us he’s rich enough for her, but doesn’t stay in the hotel, or she’d have suggested his room as first preference. So he was either local or bunking elsewhere. The question is, did he have a car? Probably, because he was in the garage. But possibly not, because the garage is also a shortcut to the other side of the block. In which case the victim might have driven him to her home herself. In which case we should fingerprint the inside of her car. The door handles and the seat belt latch at least.”
His detectives made notes.
Then Griezman said, “And best of all we now have really solid intelligence from the coroner. The perpetrator is average height and skinny. That’s scientific information. And that’s what we’re looking for. Nothing else. Forget the past clients, unless they happen to be average height and skinny. We’re not interested in anyone else. No doubt a waste of time, because no doubt he’s a sailor with back pay, long gone over the ocean, but we have to be seen to do something. But focus. Don’t waste time. Average height, skinny, his prints in her car. Check those boxes. Nothing else. No wild goose chases. Save your energy for the next thing.”
The detectives filed out, and Griezman breathed out, and leaned back in his chair.
—
At that moment the American was in Amsterdam, showering. He had gotten up late. He was in a hotel one street away from prime time. It was small and clean and some of the guests were airline pilots. It was that kind of place. He had been down for coffee and had seen the German papers in the breakfast room. No headlines. They were nowhere. He was safe.
—
At that moment the messenger was in a Toyota pick-up truck, just five miles into three hundred by road. To be followed by four separate airports, and three safe houses. All arduous, but the worst came first. The road was rough. Hard on the truck, and hard on the passenger. It was fatiguing. In places it was barely a road at all. In places it was more like an extinct riverbed. But such was the price of seclusion.
—
The sun rolled west, first lighting up the Delaware coast, and then the eastern shore of Maryland, and then D.C. itself, the city temporarily magnificent in the early light, as if designed specifically for that single moment of the day. Then dawn reached McLean, and the catering truck arrived in the corporate park, with coffee and breakfast. Everyone was awake and waiting. Landry and Vanderbilt and Neagley were quartered in the second of the three buildings on the Educational Solutions campus. Same deal, beds where desks had been. The NSC guys played team tag out of the third building, always one on duty, always one asleep.
White said, “All but ten of the programmers are either back in the States already or ticketed en route. The missing ten are expats. They live in Europe and Asia. One of them lives right there in Hamburg.”
“Congratulations,” Reacher said. “You cracked the case.”
“It’s a question of priority order. Is an expat more likely to be a bad guy or not? Should we look at them first or second?”
“Who is the guy in Hamburg?”
“We have a photograph. He’s a counterculture guy. Into computers early. He says sooner or later they’ll make the world more democratic. Which means he steals and breaks things and calls it politics, not crime. Or performance art.”
Vanderbilt dug out the picture. It was a head and shoulders shot at the top left of a page torn out of a magazine. An opinion piece, in what felt like an underground journal. The photograph was of a skinny white guy with a huge shock of hair. Like he had his finger in an outlet. Part mad professor, part merry prankster. He was forty years old.
White said, “The Hamburg head of station did a little walking surveillance. The guy isn’t home right now.”
Reacher said, “If he lives there, why did he schedule the first rendezvous while the convention was in town? That’s a busy week. And there are folks who know him. They might notice. Better to do it before or after.”
“Therefore in your opinion the timing proves it was a visitor to the convention.”
“In my opinion this whole thing is Alice in Wonderland.”
“As of now it’s all we’ve got.”
Reacher said, “How far do these messengers travel?”
“Not as far as here. Not yet. Not as far as we know. But they go all through Western Europe, and Scandinavia, and North Africa. And the Middle East, of course.”
“So the best you can do is keep track of the programmers who made it home, and wait for one of them to go back again for the second rendezvous. For the yes or no answer. But not necessarily to Hamburg. Your theory says Hamburg was convenient the first time around because of the convention. Therefore somewhere else might be more convenient the second time around. Paris, or London. Or Marrakesh. Your theory makes no prediction as to location.”
“We’ll know what ticket the guy buys. We’ll know where he’s headed.”
“He’ll buy at the last minute.”
“We’ll still know what plane he gets on.”
“But too late. What are you going to do then? Get the next flight out and arrive four hours after the deal is done?”
“You’re a real ray of sunshine, you know that?”
“Your theory says at the same time the messenger will also be moving. Toward the same destination.”
“We don’t know what name he’ll be using or where he’ll be coming from. Or what passport he’ll be using. Pakistani, possibly. Or British. Or French. Too many variables. We looked back two days before the first rendezvous, and there were five hundred plausible contenders through the Hamburg airport alone. We can’t tell one from the other on paper. We wouldn’t know who to watch.”
“Drink more coffee,” Reacher said. “That usually fixes things up.”
—
In Hamburg it was lunch time, and Chief of Detectives Griezman was minutes away from a fine spread in a cellar restaurant not far from his office. But first he had work to finish. Part of his role as chief was to pass on intelligence to those who needed it. Like an editor, or a curator. Someone had to be responsible. Someone’s fat ass had to get fired if the dots didn’t join up afterward. That’s why he got the big bucks, as they said on the television.
Naturally he tended toward caution. Better safe than sorry. Practically everything got sent somewhere. Before lunch every day. He scanned carbons and Xeroxes and made separate labeled piles, for this agency and that. His secretary had them biked out, while he was eating.
Near the top of the pile was another report from the prostitute investigation. Among the names gathered during the door-to-door inquiries in her street were a U.S. Army major and a noncommissioned officer who claimed to be there for the purposes of tourism. The reporting officer had followed up by checking with border control records at the airport. He had discovered both Americans had indeed arrived that morning, as claimed. Therefore both could be eliminated as suspects, but the reporting officer wished to point out they didn’t look like tourists.
Better safe than sorry. Griezman tossed the report into the space labeled U.S. Army Command HQ Stuttgart, where it was so far the only entry of the day.
Then he read a routine one-paragraph cover-your-ass statement from the uniformed branch. It said several days ago an individual member of the public had contacted them by telephone to report that in the late afternoon he had seen an American in conversation with a dark-skinned man probably from the Middle East, in a bar just out from downtown. The member of the public further claimed the dark-skinned man was acting in an agitated manner, no doubt due to life or death secrets related to regional unrest due to historic inequities. But local officers were quick to advise that the informant in question was a known paranoid and fanatic, known for making frequent phone calls of sim
ilar doomsday content, and anyway the Middle Easterner was entitled to act in an agitated manner, because it was a hardcore bar, and his presence would not have been welcomed or long tolerated. All that said, the matter was still considered worthy of recording.
Therefore worthy of passing on up the chain, Griezman decided. Two could play the cover-your-ass game. But passing on to where? The American consulate, of course. Partly as a tweak about the bullying behavior. Why would an American invite an Arab to a bar like that? The invitation certainly couldn’t have been the other way around. It couldn’t have been the Middle Easterner’s first choice of venue. What had been the purpose?
But mostly he passed it on because an American was talking to an Arab. All of a sudden they were very interested in things like that. There were brownie points to be earned. There were careers to be built.
He tossed the paragraph into the space labeled U.S. Consulate Hamburg, where it was also the only entry of the day.
Chapter 9
Reacher and Neagley set up in the control center in the classroom. They worked on the maneuver reports. They took out a hundred, two hundred, five hundred names at a time. The military was pretty good at keeping track of people. Except people on leave. Family time, in the German suburbs. Or cheap fares home. Or vacations, or adventures. Folks all over the world. Thousands at a time, minimum.
No information.
Neagley said, “We also have three AWOLs in the mix. Plus an O-5 who refuses to say where he was that day.”
A lieutenant colonel.
Reacher said, “Who are the AWOLs?”
“All PFCs. One infantry, one armored, and one medic.”
Privates first class.
Reacher said, “Medics are running away now? When did that start? How long have they been gone?”
“The medic a week, the infantryman a week and a half, and the armored guy four months.”
“Four months is a long time.”
“They can’t find him. He hasn’t attempted to use his passport. So he’s probably still in Germany. But it’s a big country now.”