by Lee Child
I said, ‘I thought you didn’t want to know.’
‘We just crossed that line.’
‘They didn’t show ID. You were entitled to assume the detention was illegal. In which case busting out wasn’t a crime. In fact it was probably your duty.’
She shook her head. ‘I knew who they were, ID or no ID. And it’s not the busting out that I’m worried about. It’s the shoes. That’s what’s going to screw me. I stood over the guy and stole his footwear. I was looking right at him. That’s premeditation. They’ll say I had time to reflect and react appropriately.’
I looked at Jake, to see whether he wanted to be included, or whether he still figured that innocence was bliss. He shrugged, as if to say in for a penny, in for a pound. So I let the waitress finish up serving my order and then I told them what I knew. March of 1983, Sansom, the Korengal Valley. All the details, and all the implications.
Lee said, ‘There are American troops in the Korengal Valley right now. I just read about it. In a magazine. I guess it never stops. I hope they’re doing better than the Russians did.’
‘They were Ukrainians,’ I said.
‘Is there a difference?’
‘I’m sure the Ukrainians think so. The Russians put their minorities out front, and their minorities didn’t like it.’
Jake said, ‘I get it about World War Three. At the time, I mean. But this is a quarter-century later. The Soviet Union isn’t even a country any more. How can a country be aggrieved about something, if it doesn’t even exist today?’
‘Geopolitics,’ Lee said. ‘It’s about the future, not the past. Maybe we want to do similar stuff again, in Pakistan or Iran or wherever. It makes a difference if the world knows we did it before. It sets up preconceptions. You know that. You’re a cop. You like it when we can’t mention prior convictions in court?’
Jake said, ‘So how big of a deal do you think this is?’
‘Huge,’ Lee said. ‘As big as can be. For us, anyway. Because overall it’s still small. Which is ironic, right? You see what I mean? If three thousand people knew, there’s not much anyone could do about it. Or three hundred, even. Or thirty. It would be out there, end of story. But right now only the three of us know. And three is a small number. Small enough to be contained. They can make three people disappear without anyone noticing.’
‘How?’
‘It happens, believe me. Who’s going to pay attention? You’re not married. Me either.’ She looked at me and asked, ‘Reacher, are you married?’
I shook my head.
She paused a second. She said, ‘No one left behind to ask questions.’
Jake said, ‘What about people where we work?’
‘Police departments do what they’re told.’
‘This is insane.’
‘This is the new world.’
‘Are they serious?’
‘It’s a cost-benefit analysis. Three innocent people versus a big geopolitical deal? What would you do?’
‘We have rights.’
‘We used to.’
Jake said nothing in reply to that. I finished my coffee and washed it down with another glass of tap water. Lee called for the check and waited until it had arrived and I had paid it, and then she turned Leonid’s phone back on. It came to life with a merry little tune and locked on to its network and ten seconds after that its network recognized it and told it there was a text message waiting. Lee hit the appropriate button and started scrolling.
‘It’s from Docherty,’ she said. ‘He hasn’t dumped me yet.’
Then she read and scrolled, read and scrolled. I counted fifteen-second intervals in my head, and imagined the GPS chip sending out a little burst of data for every one of them, saying Here we are! Here we are! I got up to ten. A hundred and fifty seconds. Two and a half minutes. It was a long message. And it was full of bad news, according to Lee’s face. Her lips compressed and her eyes narrowed. She checked back on a couple of paragraphs and then she shut the thing down again and handed it back to me. I put it in my pocket. She looked straight at me and said,
‘You were right. The dead guys under the FDR Drive were Lila Hoth’s crew. I guess the 17th called everyone in the phone book and checked out the only one that didn’t answer. They broke into their offices and found billing records made out to Lila Hoth, in care of the Four Seasons Hotel.’
I didn’t answer.
She said, ‘But here’s the thing. Those billing records go back three months, not three days. And the other data is in. Homeland Security has no record of two women called Hoth ever entering the country. Certainly not three days ago on British Airways. And Susan Mark never called London, either from work or from home.’
FORTY-EIGHT
Use the phone and move on immediately, was the rule. We took Broadway north. Taxis and police cruisers sped past us. Headlight beams washed over us. We hustled as far as Astor Place and then ducked underground and burned three of my four remaining Metrocard rides on the 6 train north. Where it all began. Another bright new R142A car. It was eleven in the evening and there were eighteen passengers in addition to ourselves. We got three spaces together on one of the eight-person benches. Lee sat in the middle. On her left Jake half turned and bent his head, ready for quiet talk. On her right I did the same thing. Jake asked, ‘So which is it? Are the Hoths phony or is the government already covering its ass by erasing data?’
Lee said, ‘Could be either.’
I said, ‘The Hoths are phony.’
‘You think or you know?’
‘It was too easy at Penn station.’
‘How?’
‘They sucked me in. Leonid let me see him. He was wearing a jacket that looked bright orange under the lights. It was practically the same as the safety vests I saw some railroad workers wearing. It drew my eye. I was supposed to notice it. Then he let me hit him. Because I was supposed to take the phone from him and find out about the Four Seasons. They manipulated me. There are layers upon layers here. They needed to talk to me but they didn’t want me to see everything. They didn’t want to show their whole hand. So they set up a way in for me. They lured me to the hotel and tried a sweet, easy approach. Just one guy acting incompetent at the railroad station, and then the soft soap. They even had a back-up plan, which was coming to the precinct house and making the missing persons report. Either way I would have showed up eventually.’
‘What do they want from you?’
‘Susan’s information.’
‘Which was what?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Who are they?’
‘Not journalists,’ I said. ‘I guess I was wrong about that. Lila was acting one thing, acting another thing. I don’t know what she really is.’
‘Is the old woman for real?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Where are they now? They bailed out of the hotel.’
‘They always had somewhere else. They had two tracks running. Public consumption, and private business. So I don’t know where they are now. Their alternative place, obviously. Some long-term secure location, I guess. Here in the city, probably. Maybe a town house. Because they have a crew with them. People of their own. Bad people. Those private guys were right. How bad, they just found out the hard way. With the hammers.’
Lee said, ‘So the Hoths are covering their asses too.’
‘Wrong tense,’ I said. ‘They already covered them. They’re hunkered down someplace and anyone who might have known where is dead.’
* * *
The train stopped at 23rd Street. The doors opened. No one got on. No one got off. Theresa Lee stared at the floor. Jacob Mark looked across her at me and said, ‘If Homeland Security can’t even track Lila Hoth into the country, then they also can’t tell if she went to California or not. Which means it could have been her, with Peter.’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘It could have been.’
The doors closed. The train moved on.
Theresa Lee looked up fro
m the floor and turned to me and said, ‘What happened to those four guys was our fault, you know. With the hammers. Your fault, specifically. You told Lila you knew about them. You turned them into a loose end.’
I said, ‘Thanks for pointing that out.’
You tipped her over the edge.
Your fault, specifically.
The train rattled into the 28th Street station.
* * *
We got out at 33rd Street. None of us wanted to hit Grand Central. Too many cops, and in Jacob Mark’s case at least, maybe too many negative associations. At street level Park Avenue was busy. Two cop cars came past in the first minute. To the west was the Empire State Building. Too many cops. We doubled back south and took a quiet cross street towards Madison. I was feeling pretty good by then. I had spent sixteen hours out of seventeen fast asleep, and I was full of food and fluids. But Lee and Jake looked beat. They had nowhere to go and weren’t used to it. Obviously they couldn’t go home. They couldn’t go to friends, either. We had to assume all their known haunts were being watched.
Lee said, ‘We need a plan.’
I liked the look of the block we were on. New York has hundreds of separate micro-neighbourhoods. Flavour and nuance vary street by street, sometimes building by building. Park and Madison in the high 20s are slightly seedy. The cross streets are a little down at heel. Maybe once they were high end, and maybe one day they will be again, but right then they were comfortable. We hid out under sidewalk scaffolding for a spell and watched drunks staggering home from bars, and people from nearby apartment houses walking their dogs before bed. We saw a guy with a Great Dane the size of a pony, and a girl with a rat terrier the size of the Great Dane’s head. Overall I preferred the rat terrier. Small dog, big personality. That little guy thought he was boss of the world. We waited until the clock passed midnight and then we snaked back and forth west and east until we found the right kind of hotel. It was a narrow place with an out-of-date illuminated sign backed with low-wattage bulbs. It looked a little run down and grimy. Smaller than I would have liked. Bigger places work much better. Greater chance of empty rooms, more anonymity, less supervision. But all in all the place we were looking at was feasible.
It was a decent target for the fifty dollar trick. Or maybe we could even get away with forty.
In the end we had to bid our way up to seventy-five, probably because the night porter suspected we had some kind of a sexual threesome in mind. Maybe because of the way Theresa Lee was looking at me. There was something going on in her eyes. I wasn’t sure what. But clearly the night porter saw an opportunity to raise his rate. The room he gave us was small. It was at the back of the building and had twin beds and a narrow window on an air shaft. It was never going to show up in a tourist brochure, but it felt secure and clandestine and I could tell that Lee and Jake felt good about spending the night in it. But equally I could tell that neither one of them felt good about spending two nights in it, or five, or ten.
‘We need help,’ Lee said. ‘We can’t live like this indefinitely.’
‘We can if we want to,’ I said. ‘I’ve lived like this for ten years.’
‘OK, a normal person can’t live like this indefinitely. We need help. This problem isn’t going to go away.’
‘It could,’ Jake said. ‘From how you were figuring it before. If three thousand people k new, it wouldn’t be a problem any more. So all we have to do is tell three thousand people.’
‘One at a time?’
‘No, we should call the newspapers.’
‘Would they believe us?’
‘If we were convincing.’
‘Would they print the story?’
‘Why wouldn’t they?’
‘Who knows what goes on with newspapers now? Maybe they would check with the government about a thing like this. Maybe the government would tell them to sit on it.’
‘What about freedom of the press?’
Lee said, ‘Yes, I remember that.’
‘So who the hell will help us?’
‘Sansom,’ I said. ‘Sansom will help us. He’s got the biggest investment here.’
‘Sansom is the government. He had his own guy trailing Susan.’
‘Because he has a lot to lose. We can use that.’ I took Leonid’s phone out of my pocket and dropped it on the bed next to Theresa Lee. ‘Text Docherty in the morning. Get the number or the Cannon House Office Building in D.C. Call Sansom’s office and demand to speak with him personally. Tell him you’re a police officer in New York and that you’re with me. Tell him we know his guy was on the train. Then tell him we know the DSM wasn’t for the VAL rifle. Tell him we know there’s more.’
FORTY-NINE
Theresa Lee picked up the phone and held it for a moment like it was a rare and precious jewel. Then she put it on the night stand and asked, ‘What makes you think there’s more?’
I said, ‘Overall there has to be more. Sansom won four medals, not just one. He was a regular go-to guy. He must have done all kinds of things.’
‘Like what?’
‘Whatever needed doing. For whoever needed it done. Not just the army. Delta guys were loaned out, from time to time. To the CIA, on occasion.’
‘To do what?’
‘Covert interventions. Coups. Assassinations.’
‘Marshal Tito died in 1980. In Yugoslavia. You think Sansom did that?’
‘No, I think Tito got sick. But I wouldn’t be surprised if there was a back-up plan, in case he stayed healthy.’
‘Brezhnev died in 1982. In Russia. The Andropov, pretty soon after that. Then Chernenko, real quick. It was like an epidemic.’
‘What are you? A historian?’
‘Amateur. But whatever, all that led to Gorbachev, and progress. You think that was us? You think that was Sansom?’
‘Maybe,’ I said. ‘I don’t know.’
‘But whatever, none of that kind of stuff relates to March of 1983 in Afghanistan.’
‘But think about it. Stumbling into a Soviet sniper team in the dark was a totally random chance. Would they have sent a go-to ace like Sansom walking around in the hills, hoping for the best? A hundred times out of a hundred and one he would have come up empty. That’s a massive risk for very little reward. That’s no kind of mission planning. A mission needs an achievable objective.’
‘A lot of them fail.’
‘Of course they do. But they all start out with a realistic target. More realistic than blundering around in a thousand square miles of empty mountains hoping for a random face to face encounter. So there must have been something else going on.’
‘That’s pretty vague.’
‘There’s more,’ I said. ‘And it’s not so vague. People have been talking to me for days. And I’ve been listening. Some of what I heard doesn’t make much sense. Those federal guys snarled me up at the Watergate in D.C. I asked them what was going on. Their reaction was weird. It was like the sky was about to fall. It was way out of proportion for some technical trespass twenty-five years ago.’
‘Geopolitics isn’t simple.’
‘I agree. And I’m the first to admit I’m no kind of an expert. But even so it seemed way over the top.’
‘That’s still vague.’
‘I spoke to Sansom in D.C. At his office. He seemed sour about the whole thing. Gloomy, and kind of troubled.’
‘It’s election season.’
‘But grabbing up the rifle was kind of cool, wasn’t it? Nothing to be ashamed of. It was all about what the army used to call dash and daring. So his reaction was wrong.’
‘Still vague.’
‘He knew the sniper’s name. Grigori Hoth. From his dog tags. I figured he had the tags as souvenirs. He said, no, those tags were locked up with the after-action reports and everything else. It was like a slip of the tongue. And everything else? What did that mean?’
Lee said nothing.
I said, ‘We talked about the fate of the sniper and the spotter. Sansom said he had
no silenced weapons. Which was like another slip of the tongue. Delta would never set up for clandestine nighttime incursions without silenced weapons. They’re particular about stuff like that. Which suggests to me that the whole VAL episode was an accidental byproduct of something else entirely. I thought the rifle was the story. But this thing is like an iceberg. Most of it is still hidden.’
Lee said nothing.
I said, ‘Then we talked about the geopolitics. He saw a danger, for sure. He’s worried about Russia, or the Russian Federation, or whatever it is they call themselves now. He thinks they’re unstable. He said things could blow up big, if the Korengal part of the story gets out. You hear that? The Korengal part of the story? It was like a third slip of the tongue. It was effectively a direct admission that there’s more. Direct from the horse’s mouth.’
Lee didn’t answer. Jacob Mark asked, ‘What kind of more?’
‘I don’t know. But whatever it is, it’s information-intensive. Right from the start Lila Hoth was looking for a USB memory. And the feds assume there’s one out there somewhere. They said their task is to recover the real memory stick. Real, because they took a look at the one I bought and assumed it was a decoy. They said, it’s empty and it’s too small anyway. Hear that? Too small? Which means there are some big files in play. Lots of information.’
‘But Susan didn’t have anything with her.’
‘True. But everybody assumes she did.’
‘What kind of information?’
‘I have no idea. Except that Springfield talked to me here in New York. Sansom’s security guy, at the Sheraton. In a quiet corridor. He was very uptight. He was warning me off. He chose a specific metaphor. He said, you can’t afford to turn over the wrong rock.’
‘So?’
‘What happens when you turn over a rock?’
‘Things crawl out.’
‘Exactly. Present tense. Things crawl out. This is not about things just lying there, that died twenty-five years ago. This is about things that are squirming and wriggling right now. This is about things that are alive today.’