Lee Child - [Jack Reacher 01-16]

by Jack Reacher Series (epub)

  He walked on. The coat was pretty good, but he should have bought a hat to go with it. That was clear. The same buddy with the opinion on coats used to claim that half of total heat loss was through the top of the head, and that was certainly how it felt. The cold was blowing through his hair and making his eyes water. A military-issue watch cap would have been valuable, in November on the Jersey shore. He made a mental note to keep an eye out for surplus stores on his way back from the Western Union office. In his experience they often inhabited the same neighborhoods.

  He reached the boardwalk and walked south, with the same itch still there in the small of his back. He turned suddenly and saw nothing. Walked back north to where he had started. The boards under his feet were in good shape. There was a notice claiming they were made from some special hardwood, the hardest timber the world’s forests had to offer. The feeling was still there in the small of his back. He turned and led his invisible shadows out onto the Central Pier. It was the original structure, preserved. It looked like he guessed it must have way back when it was built. It was deserted, which was no surprise considering the weather, and which added to the feeling of unreality. It was like an architectural photograph from a history book. But some of the little antique booths were open and selling things, including one selling modern coffee in plastic cups. He bought a twenty-ounce black regular, which took all his remaining cash, but warmed him through. He walked to the end of the pier as he drank it. Dropped the cup in the trash and stood and watched the gray ocean for a spell. Then he turned back and headed for the shore and saw two men walking toward him.

  They were useful-sized guys, short but wide, dressed pretty much alike in blue peacoats and gray denim pants. They both had hats. Little knitted watch caps made from gray wool, jammed down over meaty heads. Clearly they knew how to dress for the climate. They had their hands in their pockets, so he couldn’t tell whether they had gloves to match. Their pockets were high on their coats, so their elbows were forced outward. They both wore heavy boots, the sort of things a steelworker or a stevedore might choose. They were both a little bowlegged, or maybe they were just attempting an intimidating swagger. They both had a little scar tissue around their brows. They looked like fairground scufflers or dockyard bruisers from fifty years ago. Reacher glanced back and saw nobody behind him, all the way to Ireland. So he just stopped walking. Didn’t worry about putting his back against the rail.

  The two men walked on and stopped eight feet in front of him and faced him head-on. Reacher flexed his fingers by his side, to test how cold they were. Eight feet was an interesting choice of distance. It meant they were going to talk before they tangled. He flexed his toes and ran some muscle tension up through his calves, his thighs, his back, his shoulders. Moved his head side to side and then back a little, to loosen his neck. He breathed in through his nose. The wind was on his back. The guy on the left took his hands out of his pockets. No gloves. And either he had bad arthritis or he was holding rolls of quarters in both palms.

  “We got a message for you,” he said.

  Reacher glanced at the pier rail and the ocean beyond. The sea was gray and roiled. Probably freezing. Throwing them in would be close to homicide.

  “From that club manager?” he asked.

  “From his people, yeah.”

  “He’s got people?”

  “This is Atlantic City,” the guy said. “Stands to reason he’s got people.”

  Reacher nodded. “So let me guess. I’m supposed to get out of town, skedaddle, beat it, get lost, never come back, never darken your door again, forget I was ever here.”

  “You’re on the ball today.”

  “I can read minds,” Reacher said. “I used to work a fairground booth. Right next to the bearded lady. Weren’t you guys there too? Three booths along? The World’s Ugliest Twins?”

  The guy on the right took his hands out of his pockets. He had the same neuralgic pain in his knuckles, or else a couple more rolls of quarters. Reacher smiled. He liked rolls of quarters. Good old-fashioned technology. And they implied the absence of firearms. Nobody clutches rolls of coins if they’ve got a gun in their pocket.

  “We don’t want to hurt you,” the guy on the right said.

  “But you got to go,” the guy on the left said. “We don’t need people interfering in this town’s economic procedures.”

  “So take the easy way out,” the guy on the right said. “Let us walk you to the bus depot. Or the old folk could wind up getting hurt, too. And not just financially.”

  Reacher heard an absurd voice in his head: straight from his childhood, his mother saying please don’t fight when you’re wearing new clothes. Then he heard a boot-camp unarmed-combat instructor saying hit them fast, hit them hard, and hit them a lot. He flexed his shoulders inside his coat. Suddenly felt very grateful to the woman in the store for making him take the bigger size. He gazed at the two guys, exactly nothing in his eyes except a little amusement and a lot of absolute self-confidence. He moved a little to his left, and they rotated with him. He moved a little closer to them, tightening the triangle. He raised his hand and smoothed his hair where the wind was disturbing it.

  “Better just to walk away now,” he said.

  They didn’t, like he knew they wouldn’t. They responded to the challenge by crowding in toward him, imperceptibly, just a fractional muscle movement that eased their body weight forward rather than backward. They need to be laid up for a week, he thought. Cheekbones, probably. A sharp blow, depressed fractures, maybe temporary loss of consciousness, bad headaches. Nothing too severe. He waited until the wind gusted again and raised his right hand and swept his hair back behind his left ear. Then he kept his hand there, with his elbow poised high, like a thought had just struck him.

  “Can you guys swim?” he asked.

  It would have taken superhuman self-control not to glance at the ocean. They weren’t superhuman. They turned their heads like robots. He clubbed the right-hand guy in the face with his raised elbow and cocked it again and hit the left-hand guy as his head snapped back toward the sound of his buddy’s bones breaking. They went down on the boards together and their rolls of quarters split open and coins rolled everywhere and pirouetted small silver circles and collided and fell over, heads and tails. Reacher coughed in the bitter cold and stood still and replayed it in his head: two guys, two seconds, two blows, game over. You’ve still got the good stuff. He breathed hard and wiped cold sweat from his forehead. Then he walked away. Stepped off the pier onto the boardwalk and went looking for Western Union.

  He had looked at the address in the motel phone book, but he didn’t need it. You could find a Western Union office by feel. By intuition. It was a simple algorithm: stand on a street corner and ask yourself, is it more likely to be left or right now? Then you turned left or right as appropriate, and pretty soon you were in the right neighborhood, and pretty soon you found it. This one had a two-year-old Chevy Suburban parked on a fireplug right outside the door. The truck was black with smoked windows, and it was immaculately clean and shiny. It had three short UHF antennas on the roof. There was a woman alone in the driver’s seat. He glanced at her once, and then again. She was fair-haired and looked relaxed and alert all at the same time. Something about the way her arm was resting against the window. And she was cute, no doubt about that. Some kind of magnetism about her. He glanced away and went inside the office and claimed his cash. Folded it into his pocket and came back out and found the woman on the sidewalk, standing right in front of him, looking straight at him. At his face, like she was checking off similarities and differences against a mental image. It was a process he recognized. He had been looked at like that once or twice before.

  “Jack Reacher?” she said.

  He double-checked his memory, because he didn’t want to be wrong, although he didn’t think he was. Short fair hair, great eyes looking right at him, some kind of a quiet confidence in the way she held herself. She had qualities he would remember. He was s
ure of that. But he didn’t remember them. Therefore he had never seen her before.

  “You knew my brother,” he said.

  She looked surprised, and a little gratified. And temporarily lost for words.

  “I could tell,” he said. “People look at me like that, they’re thinking about how we look a lot alike, but also a lot different.”

  She said nothing.

  “Been nice meeting you,” he said, and moved away.

  “Wait,” she called.

  He turned back.

  “Can we talk?” she said. “I’ve been looking for you.”

  He nodded. “We could talk in the car. I’m freezing my ass off out here.”

  She was still for a second longer, with her eyes locked on his face. Then she moved suddenly and opened the passenger door.

  “Please,” she said. He climbed in and she walked around the hood and climbed in on her side. Started the engine to run the heater, but didn’t go anywhere.

  “I knew your brother very well,” she said. “We dated, Joe and I. More than dated, really. We were pretty serious for a time. Before he died.”

  Reacher said nothing. The woman flushed.

  “Well, obviously before he died,” she said. “Stupid thing to say.”

  She went quiet.

  “When?” Reacher asked.

  “We were together two years. We broke up a year before it happened.”

  Reacher nodded.

  “I’m M. E. Froelich,” she said.

  She left an unspoken question hanging in the air: did he ever mention me? Reacher nodded again, trying to make it like the name meant something. But it didn’t. Never heard of you, he thought. But maybe I wish I had.

  “Emmy?” he said. “Like the television thing?”

  “M. E.,” she said. “I go by my initials.”

  “What are they for?”

  “I won’t tell you that.”

  He paused a beat. “What did Joe call you?”

  “He called me Froelich,” she said.

  He nodded. “Yes, he would.”

  “I still miss him,” she said.

  “Me too, I guess,” Reacher said. “So is this about Joe, or is it about something else?”

  She was still again, for another beat. Then she shook herself, a tiny subliminal quiver, and came back all business.

  “Both,” she said. “Well, mainly something else, really.”

  “Want to tell me what?”

  “I want to hire you for something,” she said. “On a kind of posthumous recommendation from Joe. Because of what he used to say about you. He talked about you, time to time.”

  Reacher nodded. “Hire me for what?”

  Froelich paused again and came up with a tentative smile.

  “I’ve rehearsed this line,” she said. “Couple of times.”

  “So let me hear it.”

  “I want to hire you to assassinate the Vice President of the United States.”

  2

  “Good line,” Reacher said. “Interesting proposition.”

  “What’s your answer?” Froelich asked.

  “No,” he said. “Right now I think that’s probably the safest all-around response.”

  She smiled the tentative smile again and picked up her purse.

  “Let me show you some ID,” she said.

  He shook his head.

  “Don’t need it,” he said. “You’re United States Secret Service.”

  She looked at him. “You’re pretty quick.”

  “It’s pretty clear,” he said.

  “Is it?”

  He nodded. Touched his right elbow. It was bruised.

  “Joe worked for them,” he said. “And knowing the way he was, he probably worked pretty hard, and he was a little shy, so anybody he dated was probably in the office, otherwise he would never have met them. Plus, who else except the government keeps two-year-old Suburbans this shiny? And parks next to hydrants? And who else but the Secret Service could track me this efficiently through my banking arrangements?”

  “You’re pretty quick,” she said again.

  “Thank you,” he said back. “But Joe didn’t have anything to do with Vice Presidents. He was in Financial Crimes, not the White House protection detail.”

  She nodded. “We all start out in Financial Crimes. We pay our dues as anticounterfeiting grunts. And he ran anticounterfeiting. And you’re right, we met in the office. But he wouldn’t date me then. He said it wasn’t appropriate. But I was planning on transferring across to the protection detail as soon as I could anyway, and as soon as I did, we started going out.”

  Then she went a little quiet again. Looked down at her purse.

  “And?” Reacher said.

  She looked up. “Something he said one night. I was kind of keen and ambitious back then, you know, starting a new job and all, and I was always trying to figure out if we were doing the best we could, and Joe and I were goofing around, and he said the only real way for us to test ourselves would be to hire some outsider to try to get to the target. To see if it was possible, you know. A security audit, he called it. I asked him, like who? And he said, my little brother would be the one. If anybody could do it, he could. He made you sound pretty scary.”

  Reacher smiled. “That sounds like Joe. A typical harebrained scheme.”

  “You think?”

  “For a smart guy, Joe could be very dumb sometimes.”

  “Why is it dumb?”

  “Because if you hire some outsider, all you need to do is watch for him coming. Makes it way too easy.”

  “No, his idea was the person would come in anonymously and unannounced. Like now, absolutely nobody knows about you except me.”

  Reacher nodded. “OK, maybe he wasn’t so dumb.”

  “He felt it was the only way. You know, however hard we work, we’re always thinking inside the box. He felt we should be prepared to test ourselves against some random challenge from the outside.”

  “And he nominated me?”

  “He said you’d be ideal.”

  “So why wait so long to try it? Whenever this conversation was, it had to be at least six years ago. Didn’t take you six years to find me.”

  “It was eight years ago,” Froelich said. “Right at the start of our relationship, just after I got the transfer. And it only took me one day to find you.”

  “So you’re pretty quick, too,” Reacher said. “But why wait eight years?”

  “Because now I’m in charge. I was promoted head of the Vice President’s detail four months ago. And I’m still keen and ambitious, and I still want to know that we’re doing it right. So I decided to follow Joe’s advice, now that it’s my call. I decided to try a security audit. And you were recommended, so to speak. All those years ago, by somebody I trusted very much. So I’m here to ask you if you’ll do it.”

  “You want to get a cup of coffee?”

  She looked surprised, like coffee wasn’t on the agenda.

  “This is urgent business,” she said.

  “Nothing’s too urgent for coffee,” he said. “That’s been my experience. Drive me back to my motel and I’ll take you to the downstairs lounge. Coffee’s OK, and it’s a very dark room. Just right for a conversation like this.”

  The government Suburban had a DVD-based navigation system built into the dash, and Reacher watched her fire it up and pick the motel’s street address off a long list of potential Atlantic City destinations.

  “I could have told you where it is,” he said.

  “I’m used to this thing,” she said. “It talks to me.”

  “I wasn’t going to use hand signals,” he said.

  She smiled again and pulled out into the traffic. There wasn’t much. Evening gloom was falling. The wind was still blowing. The casinos might do OK, but the boardwalk and the piers and the beaches weren’t going to see much business for the next six months. He sat still next to her in the warmth from the heater and thought about her with his dead brother for a
moment. Then he just watched her drive. She was pretty good at it. She parked outside the motel door and he led her inside and down a half-flight of stairs to the lounge. It smelled stale and sticky, but it was warm and there was a flask of coffee on the machine behind the bar. He pointed at it, and then at himself and Froelich, and the barman got busy. Then he walked to a corner booth and slid in across the vinyl with his back to the wall and the whole room in sight. Old habits. Froelich clearly had the same habits because she did the same thing, so they ended up close together and side by side. Their shoulders were almost touching.

  “You’re very similar to him,” she said.

  “In some ways,” he said. “Not in others. Like, I’m still alive.”

  “You weren’t at his funeral.”

  “It came at an inopportune time.”