“We were right here,” he said.
Reacher nodded. “Three of us. You, me, and Helen.”
“I didn’t hear anything.”
“Me either,” Reacher said. “They’re really good.”
“What are they going to do to her?”
“They’re going to make her give evidence against her brother. Some kind of a made-up story.”
“Will they hurt her?”
“That depends on how fast she caves.”
“She’s not going to cave,” Yanni said. “Not in a million years. Don’t you see that? She’s totally dedicated to clearing her brother’s name.”
“Then they’re going to hurt her.”
“Where is she?” Franklin asked Reacher. “Best guess?”
“Wherever they are,” Reacher said. “But I don’t know where that is.”
She was in the upstairs living room, taped to a chair. The Zec was staring at her. He was fascinated by women. Once he had gone twenty-seven years without seeing one. The penal battalion he had joined in 1943 had had a few, but they were a small minority and they died fast. And then after the Great Patriotic War had been won, his nightmare progress through the Gulag had begun. In 1949 he had seen a woman peasant near the White Sea Canal. She was a stooped and bulky old crone two hundred yards away in a beet field. Then nothing, until in 1976 he saw a nurse riding a troika sled through the frozen wastes of Siberia. He was a quarryman then. He had come up out of the hole with a hundred other zecs and was walking home in a long ragged column down a long straight road. The nurse’s sled was approaching on another road that ran at right angles. The land was flat and featureless and covered with snow. The zecs could see forever. They stood and watched the nurse drive a whole mile. Then they turned their heads as one as she passed through the crossroads and watched her through another mile. The guards denied them food that night as punishment for the unauthorized halt. Four men died, but the Zec didn’t.
“Are you comfortable?” he asked.
Rosemary Barr said nothing. The one called Chenko had returned her shoe. He had crouched in front of her and fitted it to her foot like a store clerk. Then he had backed away and sat down next to the one called Vladimir, on the sofa. The one called Sokolov had stayed downstairs in a room full of surveillance equipment. The one called Linsky was pacing the room, white with pain. He had something wrong with his back.
“When the Zec speaks, you should answer,” the one called Vladimir said.
Rosemary looked away. She was afraid of Vladimir. More so than the others. Vladimir was huge, and he gave off an air of depravity, like a smell.
“Does she understand her position?” Linsky asked. The Zec smiled at him, and Linsky smiled back. It was a private joke between them. Any claim to rights or humane treatment in the camps was always met with a question: Do you understand your position? The question was always followed by a statement: You don’t have a position. You are nothing to the Motherland. The first time Linsky had heard the question he had been about to reply, but the Zec had hauled him away. By that point the Zec had eighteen years under his belt, and the intervention was uncharacteristic. But clearly he had felt something for the raw youngster. He had taken the kid under his wing. They had been together ever since, through a long succession of locations neither of them could name. Many books had been written about the Gulag, and documents had been discovered, and maps had been made, but the irony was that those who had participated had no idea where they had been. Nobody had told them. A camp was a camp, with wire, huts, endless forest, endless tundra, endless work. What difference did a name make?
Linsky had been a soldier and a thief. In the west of Europe or in America he would have served time, two years here, three years there, but during the Soviet Union, stealing was an ideological transgression. It showed an uneducated and antisocial preference for private property. Such a preference was answered with a swift and permanent removal from civilized society. In Linsky’s case the removal had lasted from 1963 until civilized society had collapsed and Gorbachev had emptied the Gulag.
“She understands her position,” the Zec said. “And next comes acceptance.”
Franklin called Helen Rodin. Ten minutes later she was back in his office. She was still mad at Reacher. That was clear. But she was too worried about Rosemary Barr to make a big deal out of it. Franklin stayed at his desk, one eye on his computer screen. Helen and Ann Yanni sat together at a table. Reacher stared out the window. The sky was darkening.
“We should call someone,” Helen said.
“Like who?” Reacher asked.
“My father. He’s the good guy.”
Reacher turned around. “Suppose he is. What do we tell him? That we’ve got a missing person? He’ll just call the cops, because what else can he do? And if Emerson’s the bad guy, the cops will sit on it. Even if Emerson’s the good guy, the cops will sit on it just the same. Missing adults don’t get anyone very excited. Too many of them.”
“But she’s integral to our case.”
“Their case is about her brother. So the cops will figure it’s only natural she ran away. Her brother is a notorious criminal and she couldn’t stand the shame.”
“But you saw her get kidnapped. You could tell them.”
“I saw a shoe. That’s all I can tell anybody. And I’ve got no credibility here. I’ve been playing silly games for two days.”
“So what do we do?”
Reacher turned back to the window.
“We take care of it ourselves,” he said.
“How?”
“All we need is a location. We work through the woman who was shot, we get names, we get some kind of a context, we get a place. Then we go there.”
“When?” Yanni asked.
“Twelve hours,” Reacher said. “Before dawn. They’ll be working on some kind of a timetable. They want to take care of me first, and then they want to start in on Rosemary Barr. We need to get to her before they run out of patience.”
“But that means you’ll be showing up exactly when they’re expecting you.”
Reacher said nothing.
“It’s like walking into a trap,” Yanni said.
Reacher didn’t answer that. Yanni turned to Franklin and said, “Tell us more about the woman who was shot.”
“There’s nothing more to tell,” Franklin said. “I’ve been through everything forward and backward. She was very ordinary.”
“Family?”
“All of them are back East. Where she came from.”
“Friends?”
“Two, basically. A co-worker and a neighbor. Neither of them is interesting. Neither of them is a Russian, for instance.”
Yanni turned back to Reacher. “So maybe you’re wrong. Maybe the third shot wasn’t the money shot.”
“It must have been,” Reacher said. “Or why would he pause after it? He was double-checking he had a hit.”
“He paused after the sixth, too. For good.”
“He wouldn’t wait that long. It could have gone completely out of control by then. People could have been jumping all over each other.”
“But they weren’t.”
“He couldn’t have predicted that.”
“I agree,” Franklin said. “A thing like that, you don’t do it with your first or your last shot.”
Then his eyes lost focus. He stared at the wall, like he wasn’t seeing it.
“Wait,” he said.
He glanced at his screen.
“Something I forgot,” he said.
“What?” Reacher asked.
“What you said about Rosemary Barr. Missing persons.”
He turned back to his mouse and his keyboard and started clicking and typing. Then he hit his enter key and sat forward intently, like proximity would speed the process.
“Last chance,” he said.
Reacher knew from television commercials that computers operated at all kinds of gigahertz, which he assumed was pretty fast. But even so, Frankl
in’s screen stayed blank for a long, long time. There was a little graphic in the corner. It was rotating slowly. It implied a thorough and patient search through an infinite amount of data. It spun for minutes. Then it stopped. There was an electrostatic crackle from the monitor and the screen wiped down and redrew into a densely-printed document. Plain computer font. Reacher couldn’t read it from where he was.
The office went quiet.
Franklin looked up.
“OK,” he said. “There you go. At last. Finally something that isn’t ordinary. Finally we catch a break.”
“What?” Yanni said.
“Oline Archer reported her husband missing two months ago.”
CHAPTER 15
Franklin pushed his chair back to make space and the others all crowded around the screen together. Reacher and Helen Rodin ended up shoulder to shoulder. No more animosity. Just the thrill of pursuit.
Most of the document was taken up with coded headers and source information. Letters, numbers, times, origins. The substantive message was short. Two months previously, Mrs. Oline Anne Archer had made a missing persons report concerning her husband. His name was Edward Stratton Archer. He had left the marital home for work early on a routine Monday and had not returned by end-of-business on Wednesday, which was when the report was made.
“Is he still missing?” Helen asked.
“Yes,” Franklin said. He pointed to a letter A buried in the code at the top of the screen. “It’s still active.”
“So let’s go talk to Oline’s friends,” Reacher said. “We need some background here.”
“Now?” Franklin said.
“We’ve only got twelve hours,” Reacher said. “No time to waste.”
______
Franklin wrote down names and addresses for Oline Archer’s co-worker and neighbor. He handed the paper to Ann Yanni, because she was paying his bill.
“I’ll stay here,” he said. “I’ll see if the husband shows up in the databases. This could be a coincidence. Maybe he’s got a wife in every state. Wouldn’t be the first time.”
“I don’t believe in coincidences,” Reacher said. “So don’t waste your time. Find a phone number for me instead. A guy called Cash. Former Marine. He owns the range where James Barr went to shoot. Down in Kentucky. Call him for me.”
“Message?”
“Give him my name. Tell him to get his ass in his Humvee. Tell him to drive up here tonight. Tell him there’s a whole new Invitational going on.”
“Invitational?”
“He’ll understand. Tell him to bring his M24. With a night scope. And whatever else he’s got lying around.”
Reacher followed Ann Yanni and Helen Rodin down the stairs. They got into Helen’s Saturn, the women in the front and Reacher in the back. Reacher figured they would all have preferred the Mustang, but it only had two seats.
“Where first?” Helen asked.
“Which is closer?” Reacher asked back.
“The co-worker.”
“OK, her first.”
Traffic was slow. Roads were torn up and construction traffic was lumbering in and out of work zones. Reacher glanced between his watch and the windows. Daylight was fading. Evening was coming. Time ticking away.
The co-worker lived in a plain heartland suburb east of town. It was filled with a grid of straight residential streets. The streets were lined on both sides by modest ranch houses. The houses had small lots, flags on poles, hoops over the garage doors, satellite dishes on brick chimneys. Some of the sidewalk trees had faded yellow ribbons tied around them. Reacher guessed they symbolized solidarity with troops serving overseas. Which conflict, he wasn’t sure. What the point was, he had no idea. He had served overseas for most of thirteen years and had never met anyone who cared what was tied to trees back home. As long as someone sent paychecks and food and water and bullets, and wives stayed faithful, most guys were happy enough.
The sun was going down behind them and Helen was driving slowly with her head ducked forward so she could see the house numbers early. She spotted the one she wanted and pulled into a driveway and parked behind a small sedan. It was new. Reacher recognized the brand name from his walk up the four-lane: America’s Best Warranty!
The co-worker herself was a tired and harassed woman of about thirty-five. She opened her door and stepped out to the stoop and pulled the door shut behind her to block out the noise from what sounded like a dozen kids running riot inside. She recognized Ann Yanni immediately. Even glanced beyond her, looking for a camera crew.
“Yes?” she said.
“We need to talk about Oline Archer,” Helen Rodin said.
The woman said nothing. She looked conflicted, like she knew she was supposed to think it was tasteless to talk about victims of tragedy to journalists. But apparently Ann Yanni’s celebrity status overcame her reluctance.
“OK,” she said. “What do you want to know? Oline was a lovely person and all of us at the office miss her terribly.”
The nature of randomness, Reacher thought. Random slayings always involved people described as lovely afterward. Nobody ever said She was a rat-faced fink and I’m glad she’s dead. Whoever it was did us all a favor. That never happened.
“We need to know something about her husband,” Helen said.
“I never met her husband,” the woman said.
“Did Oline talk about him?”
“A little, I guess. Now and then. His name is Ted, I think.”
“What does he do?”
“He’s in business. I’m not sure what kind of business.”
“Did Oline say anything about him being missing?”
“Missing?”
“Oline reported him missing two months ago.”
“I know she seemed terribly worried. I think he was having problems with his business. In fact I think he’d been having problems for a year or two. That’s why Oline went back to work.”
“She didn’t always work?”
“Oh, no, ma’am. I think she did way back, and then she gave it up. But she had to come back. Because of circumstances. Whatever the opposite of rags to riches is.”
“Riches to rags,” Reacher said.
“Yes, like that,” the woman said. “She needed her job, financially. I think she was embarrassed about it.”
“But she didn’t give you details?” Ann Yanni asked.
“She was a very private person,” the woman said.
“It’s important.”
“She would get kind of distracted. That wasn’t like her. About a week before she was killed she was gone most of one afternoon. That wasn’t like her, either.”
“Do you know what she was doing?”
“No, I really don’t.”
“Anything you remember about her husband would help us.”
The woman shook her head. “His name is Ted. That’s all I can say for sure.”
“OK, thanks,” Helen said.
She turned and headed back to her car. Yanni and Reacher followed her. The woman on the stoop stared after them, disappointed, like she had failed an audition.
Ann Yanni said, “Strike one. But don’t worry. It always happens that way. Sometimes I think we should just skip the first person on the list. They never know anything.”
Reacher was uncomfortable in the back of the car. His pants pocket had gotten underneath him and a coin was digging edge-on into his thigh. He squirmed around and pulled it out. It was a quarter, new and shiny. He looked at it for a minute and then he put it in the other pocket.
“I agree,” he said. “We should have skipped her. My fault. Stands to reason a co-worker wouldn’t know much. People are cagy around co-workers. Especially rich people fallen on hard times.”
“The neighbor will know more,” Yanni said.
“We hope,” Helen said.
They were caught in crosstown traffic. They were headed from the eastern suburbs to the western, and it was a slow, slow ride. Reacher was glancing between his watch and
the windows again. The sun was low on the horizon ahead of them. Behind them it was already twilight.
Time ticking away.
Rosemary Barr moved in her chair and struggled against the tape binding her wrists.
“We know it was Charlie who did it,” she said.
“Charlie?” the Zec repeated.
“My brother’s so-called friend.”
“Chenko,” the Zec said. “His name is Chenko. And yes, he did it. Tactically it was his plan. He did well. Of course, his physique helped. He was able to wear his own shoes inside your brother’s. He had to roll the pants and the raincoat sleeves.”
“But we know,” Rosemary said.
“But who knows? And what exactly do they bring to the party?”
“Helen Rodin knows.”
“You’ll dismiss her as your lawyer. You’ll terminate the representation. Ms. Rodin will be unable to repeat anything she learned while your relationship was privileged. Linsky, am I right?”
Linsky nodded. He was six feet away, on the sofa, propped at an odd angle to rest his back.
“That’s the law,” he said. “Here in America.”
“Franklin knows,” Rosemary said. “And Ann Yanni.”
“Hearsay,” the Zec said. “Theories, speculation, and innuendo. Those two have no persuasive evidence. And no credibility, either. Private detectives and television journalists are exactly the kind of people who peddle ridiculous and alternative explanations for events like these. It’s to be expected. Its absence would be unusual. Apparently a president was killed in this country more than forty years ago and people like them still claim that the real truth has not yet been uncovered.”
Rosemary said nothing.
“Your deposition will be definitive,” the Zec said. “You’ll go to Rodin and you’ll give sworn testimony about how your brother plotted and planned. About how he told you what he was intending. In detail. The time, the place, everything. You’ll say that to your sincere and everlasting regret you didn’t take him seriously. Then some poor excuse for a public defender will take one look at your evidence and plead your brother guilty and the whole thing will be over.”
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