by Dan Ames
With great interest, he read the files Wyman had sent him.
35
Pauling had to marvel over Jack Reacher’s ability to fade into the background. She’d had plenty of time on the flight from New York to Atlanta to ponder how he’d managed it.
He had no doubt avenged his brother’s death, helped to bring down a massive counterfeiting operation, and had then faded into the background. Probably hitchhiked or took a bus off into the distance.
It was really unbelievable.
The plane touched down and she headed to the rental car company, requesting the best sports car they had. She needed to make good time and wasn’t about to push a four-cylinder subcompact to its limits.
They had a BMW 7 series with a powerful V-8 engine.
Perfect.
The drive took no time and soon she was driving the BMW through the outskirts of tiny Margrave, Georgia.
Once again, her thoughts turned to Reacher. She had no trouble imagining him taking over a town like this. She passed a small restaurant called Eno’s Diner and figured Reacher had partaken in his usual breakfast of coffee, bacon and pancakes. Probably several times.
She remembered that he’d mentioned something about a blues singer being from the small town, and that was the reason for his visit.
Blind Blake or something like that.
It was classic Reacher. He’d just wandered into the small town because he’d been curious about a forgotten blues musician and had gotten into a lot more than he’d bargained for.
Pauling didn’t feel any type of kismet with Reacher. He hitchhiked, drifted. Her plane ticket had been a first-class flight and now she was driving a car worth seventy thousand dollars.
She and Reacher had been so different but somehow, they had meshed.
Pauling passed the quaint little downtown, the old-fashioned barber shop and headed straight for the police station.
It would be the fastest way to possibly figure out what the hell was going on.
She pulled the BMW into a visitor parking space and went inside.
Pauling explained who she was to the cop manning the reception desk and the chief of police came out to see her. His name was Barkin and after he’d looked her over, made sure she wasn’t a loon just in off the street, escorted her back to his office.
“The Kliner case,” she said as she settled into a chair across from his desk.
Barkin let out a low whistle. He was a middle-aged man with a bushy moustache and a tired expression, but his blue eyes were sharp and focused. The office smelled vaguely of coffee and pipe tobacco.
“What a nightmare,” he said. “When that whole thing went down, the entire town almost went with it. That illegal money had been supporting everyone and everything for years. The Kliners had paid off pretty much all the merchants in Margrave. They got something like a couple grand a week just to keep quiet. People took the money. Can you blame them?”
“So what happened?”
“Well, once the money stopped it was almost like what they call a market correction, in economical terms. Quite a few businesses went under, and half the town left. But slowly, things turned around and now the town is doing fine. While it’s not booming like before, at least it’s real. We had a good-sized company that makes commercial refrigerators set up shop just outside of town. A factory that employs about a hundred local people. It’s a start.”
“What about the detective in charge of the Kliner case? Is he still around?”
“Finlay? He retired. Moved out to California.”
“Officer Roscoe?” She’d been a local cop key in the eventual cracking of the Kliner case, according to Wyman.
“She married, moved up to Charlotte. Has three kids now.”
Pauling nodded.
“Paul Hubble?” Hubble had been the leaker; he’d contacted the Treasury Department and essentially gotten Joe Reacher killed. From what Pauling had been able to figure out from the case file, he’d gone into witness protection.
“No sign of him.”
“Has anything changed recently? Any news on the Kliner front?”
For the first time, Barkin’s expression faltered. He hesitated.
“Just a rumor,” he began.
Pauling waited.
“Word is a Kliner cousin, name of Thomas, tasted freedom for the first time in a number of years. No idea where he went, though. Haven’t seen him around here. No reason to come back, anyway. Everyone’s long gone.”
“Yeah,” she said.
Pauling knew he was wrong.
And she suspected that he did, too.
36
Tallon opened his eyes and immediately sensed movement.
He was in a vehicle. Not an airplane or a car.
Some kind of van, or motor home. He was hog-tied and his arms were locked around a steel stanchion bolted to the floor of the vehicle.
He tried to glance around, but he couldn’t move his shoulders enough to turn and his back was to the front of the vehicle.
Tallon silently cursed himself.
Sloppy, he thought. Just plain amateurish to let himself get jumped like that. He was angry and embarrassed.
The plastic ties were cutting into his wrist and all he could see was the dark reflection of highway lines passing by. He had a headache from the chloroform and his neck ached from where the Taser had blasted him.
So stupid, he thought. Clearly, his buddy’s email had been hacked. That actually should have tipped him off; the fact that he’d never actually had a phone conversation with him. It had all taken place over email. Tallon wondered what would have happened had he called. The call probably would have been intercepted or they’d have let it go to voicemail and then responded with an email.
His buddy in Australia probably had no idea that Tallon thought he was en route.
Okay, enough bitching, he thought. Time to take action. He always felt better when he was doing something and the way to make himself come to terms with the fact that he’d been abducted?
Turn the tables.
Now.
He glanced down and saw that his captors hadn’t taken the shoelaces from his boots. He smiled, but at the same time it pissed him off. It made him angry because their failure to do so was a sign of their lack of professionalism. Which made the fact they’d nabbed him sting all the more.
Well, he was about to make them wish they’d never laid a hand on him.
Without shifting his body and as subtly as possible, he slid his hands down toward his boots.
37
Pauling left the Margrave Police station and drove down to Eno’s Diner. She took a booth at the back of the place and ordered coffee and a turkey sandwich.
The place was empty save for a young couple who looked like they had just graduated high school. A waitress was washing glasses behind the counter and in the back, a cook was making something on the grill. She could hear the sizzling and assumed it was either sausage or bacon. Or both.
Pauling drank her coffee and contemplated the vagaries of human nature. Over the years, she’d come to recognize that the origins of most criminal activity could be traced back to three of the most basic of human desires.
Lust.
Greed.
Hate.
Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, most of her cases had come down to one of those primary motivations.
Of the three, greed was the clear frontrunner. One way or the other, it was usually about the money. America was a capitalist society. It required money to survive. If you didn’t have money, you weren’t going to make it. Period. Compared to that, lust and hate seemed almost frivolous.
She suspected greed played the key role in the murder of Giles. The case had led back to a counterfeiting operation, and what was a better example of greed than producing fake money?
The question was, what were the killers after?
It sounded like the money had gone up in flames.
But what if it hadn’t? Or at least not all of it
?
At the height of the Kliner operation, hundreds upon hundreds of millions of dollars were in play.
So what if there had been a warehouse no one knew about? Or a late delivery that never got a chance to dump its load into what would become a terribly expensive bonfire?
How much would that have been? Five million? Ten? Fifty?
Pauling thought back to what Wyman had told her about the murder in Buckhead. Henry Lee. A financial advisor. A wizard with numbers who served a select clientele.
He hadn’t been mentioned in any of the Kliner case files.
Pauling slammed down her coffee cup so loudly the couple in the booth ahead of her turned and looked.
Henry Lee hadn’t been involved.
But Pauling was suddenly sure of one thing.
One of his clients almost certainly had.
38
Plastic zip ties are a thing of beauty. Cheap. Ubiquitous and strong as hell.
The only downside?
Susceptible to friction. Heating plastic makes it weak, plain and simple.
Friction was exactly what Michael Tallon was applying via the shoe lace in his hands. He’d unthreaded it from his right boot and was now sawing it back and forth against the zip ties holding his hands together. It was awkward as hell, especially as his hands were still circling the steel stanchion.
It was taking him longer than he liked because he was doing it in a way that showed no movement of his body. He didn’t want the men at the front of the vehicle to notice anything about him. He couldn’t see them, had no idea how closely they were watching him. Did they even know the chloroform had worn off? Or did they assume he was still unconscious.
He desperately hoped it was the latter.
Within five minutes, the zip ties snapped apart and Tallon twitched, just slightly. The sudden jolt of release had come too quickly and he hadn’t been able to control his body from registering the sensation.
He hoped they hadn’t noticed.
Behind him, he heard one of the men snoring. That meant one was driving, and the other one was doing what?
Watching him?
He hoped not.
Unfortunately, Tallon heard the rustle of fabric and then the soft footfalls of somebody walking on carpet.
“You awake, shithead?” the voice said.
The man must have seen Tallon’s slight movement.
Tallon felt cold steel press against his neck. This time, it wasn’t a Taser. It was the muzzle of a pistol.
He felt the vehicle slow and raised his head. He couldn’t see behind him, only sensed the vague shape of a man standing over his left shoulder.
Pulling his arms against the stanchion, he jerked as if the zip ties were holding him strong, then twisted to get a better look at his captor, and show him that he was still secure.
Lull him into being overconfident.
The gun had moved back several inches and the vehicle came to a complete stop. The man with the gun glanced back toward the driver, who was now getting to his feet.
Tallon’s hands, now free, shot up. One grabbed the gun, the other the man’s fingers which he squeezed until he heard bones breaking.
The gun came free and Tallon rotated his grip until the butt of the gun was in his palm and then he shot directly upward, catching the man above him in the bottom, meaty part of the jaw, the bullet crashing upward through his brain and splattering blood and gristle onto the ceiling of the motor coach.
The driver had just enough time to start a move toward the passenger seat, where Tallon assumed he had a gun.
Tallon shot him twice in the chest and the driver’s momentum carried him into the foot well, where he fell to the floor, his feet sticking up near the steering wheel.
The snoring man had jerked awake and he now had a panicked expression on his face, but he also had a gun in his hand. He was getting his bearings, trying to figure out which way to shoot.
Tallon would have liked to interrogate him, but instead, he had to shoot him in the head, just above his ear.
He toppled over into nearly the exact same position in which he’d been sleeping.
Tallon got to his feet, shook off the remains of the zip ties, and threaded his shoelace back into his boot, lacing it tightly.
He studied the dead men. They looked absolutely ordinary. All three were white, possibly ex-military, but certainly not elite. Low-level hired thugs, nothing more.
From the pockets of each man he dug out a wallet and a cell phone. He took all three wallets and all three cell phones and shoved them into his pockets, and then did a quick survey of the inside of the motor home.
He saw weapons including guns and knives, as well as cutting tools and plenty of plastic tarps.
A killing crew.
He remembered the autopsy Pauling had showed him. No doubt these guys were the ones who’d butchered the FBI agent in New York. Tallon had spotted the nail gun in the motor home.
Tallon glanced out the window and saw they had stopped at a truck stop.
Perfect.
He was hungry.
He would eat, and try to figure out who the hell had targeted him.
And why.
39
“Wyman.”
Pauling spoke quietly into the phone.
She was still at Eno’s Diner and knew that calling Wyman directly was a risky move, but Pauling felt like time was of the essence. Plus, she knew that by talking to the Chief of Police of Margrave that sooner or later word would get back to Steele, if it hadn’t already.
“Have you had a chance to look at Henry Lee’s clients?” Pauling asked. She was operating under the assumption that someone somewhere had managed to squirrel away a sizeable chunk of the counterfeit cash. That person would most likely have been Paul Hubble. And since Henry Lee managed money for wealthy clients, the only link she could think of was Hubble. The question is, could she determine who, and where, Hubble was?
“Doing that right now,” Wyman said. Pauling could hear the tapping of keys on a computer.
“He only had a dozen active clients,” Wyman told her. “But each one was very wealthy. Smallest portfolio is worth twelve million.”
“Huh. Anything jump out at you?”
“No. Seven of them are overseas. One is Canadian. The other lives in Argentina.”
Pauling thought about the implications. She supposed the people behind the murders could be managing the operation from outside the United Sates, but she doubted it. Certainly, they would have their people in place stateside to manage any emergencies.
Still, it didn’t seem likely.
This was an American crime, on American soil with the murders in New York and Atlanta. Plus, the original case had taken place in Georgia, although part of the counterfeiting operation had been located in Venezuela.
“Any in Venezuela?” Pauling asked.
“No.”
“That leaves three Americans?”
“Correct.”
“One lives in Malibu,” Wyman said. “The other lives in Seattle, I think he’s a software guy, the name seems familiar but I could be imagining it. The third has an address in Montana.”
“Any major shifts in their funds? Big withdrawals? Lots of activity?”
“None that I can see, but there’s a fair amount of information here and I’m not a financial investigator.” Pauling knew the FBI had a whole department full of people who dealt only with white-collar financial crimes. They could look at spreadsheets and know instantly when something smelled badly.
“Criminal history?”
“None that I can find. I ran the names, they all came back clean.”
Pauling chewed her lip.
“What are the names?” she asked.
Wyman read them off. “Darnell Poutrie. Steve Kozmos. John McCartney.”
The names rattled around in Pauling’s head.
The young couple in the booth across from her paid their bill and left. She was alone in the diner. The waitress cleared
the young couple’s plates and wiped off the table, glanced at Pauling’s coffee cup and Pauling gave her the signal she didn’t need any more.
“Pauling, are you there?” Wyman asked.
She was imagining Reacher eating here. If he were here now, she could ask him his opinion. He had so much experience as an investigator, and it was the kind of experience that was very different from hers. Although he could be a man of few words, he’d shared some of his more interesting stories with her. One in particular came to mind– Suddenly she sat up straight.
“What was the last one?”
“John McCartney.”
Pauling could picture Reacher’s face. The time he told her a story. Something about a guy he’d known who was a Beatles fan. Whenever he needed an alias, the man always used a combination of the names from the band. You know, Paul Lennon. George Starr–”
“It’s John McCartney,” Pauling practically shouted. “John McCartney is Paul Hubble.”
40
As bad as the truck stop food looked, it tasted even worse. But Tallon was starving and he shoveled the cheeseburger into his mouth, along with a greasy pile of American fries mixed with onions and cheese, and chased it all down with black coffee and a piece of apple pie. It filled his stomach but he was vaguely worried he would feel sick in about an hour.
From his vantage point, he could see the Mercedes-Benz motor home parked along the outer edge of the lot. To its right were several big rigs. So far, no one had approached the vehicle. Tallon hoped whoever was in charge of the operation would stop by and see what had happened to his men.
Which reminded him - the drivers licenses of the three dead men meant nothing to him, mainly because they were fake. All three of them. They were Florida licenses, which meant nothing.
The phones were useless, too. Just burners with calls only made between them. The contact list was empty, save for each of the other phones.