“Too much like daytime TV,” Pauling said.
She had other databases, the kind of things a conscientious PI with old friends in law enforcement and an internet connection can accumulate. But no unexplained Knights or Hobarts cropped up anywhere.
“He’s been away five years,” Pauling said. “Effectively he’ll have dropped out of sight, won’t he? Disconnected phone, unpaid utilities, like that?”
“Probably,” Reacher said. “But not necessarily. These guys are used to sudden travel. They always were, even back in the day. They usually set up automatic payments.”
“His bank account would have emptied out.”
“Depends how much was in it to start with. If he was earning then what the others are earning now he could have paid for plenty of electric bills especially when he’s not even home to turn on the lights.”
“Lane was a much smaller deal five years ago. They all were, before the terrorism gravy train left the station. Real or phony, Anne’s ransom was only a hundred grand, not ten and a half million. Wages will have been in proportion. This guy won’t have been rich.”
Reacher nodded. “He probably rented anyway. Landlord probably threw all his stuff on the sidewalk years ago.”
“So what do we do?”
“I guess we wait,” Reacher said. “For your bureaucratic buddy. Unless we grow old and die first.”
But a minute later Pauling’s phone went off again. This time it was on her desk, out in full view, and its vibration set up a soft mechanical buzz against the wood. She answered it with her name and listened for a minute. Then she closed it slowly and put it back in place.
“We’re not much older,” she said.
“What’s he got?” Reacher asked.
“Hobart,” she said. “It was Hobart who came back alive.”
CHAPTER 34
REACHER ASKED, “FIRST name?”
Pauling said, “Clay. Clay James Hobart.”
Reacher asked, “Address?”
Pauling said, “We’re waiting on an answer from the VA.”
“So let’s hit the phone books again.”
“I recycle my old phone books. I don’t keep an archive. I certainly don’t have anything from five years ago.”
“He might have family here. Who better to come back to?”
There were seven Hobarts in the book, but one of them was a duplicate. A dentist, home and office, different places, different numbers, same guy.
“Call them all,” Reacher said. “Make like a VA administrator with a paperwork glitch.”
Pauling put her desk phone on the speaker and got two answering machines with the first two calls and a false alarm on the third. Some old guy with his own VA benefits got all excited in case they were about to disappear. Pauling calmed him down and he said he had never heard of anyone called Clay James Hobart. The fourth and fifth calls were fruitless, too. The sixth call was to the dentist’s office number. He was on vacation in Antigua. His receptionist said he had no relatives called Clay James. The absolute confidence in her answer made Reacher wonder if she was more than just a receptionist. Although she wasn’t in Antigua with him. Maybe she had just worked for him a long time.
“So what now?” Pauling said.
“We’ll try the first two again later,” Reacher said. “Apart from that, it’s back to growing old together.”
* * *
But Pauling’s Pentagon buddy was on some kind of a roll because eleven minutes later her cell buzzed again and the guy came through with more information. Reacher saw Pauling put it all down on a yellow pad in fast scrawled handwriting that he couldn’t read upside down and from a distance. Two pages of notes. It was a long call. So long that when it was over Pauling checked the battery icon on her phone and plugged it into a charger.
“Hobart’s address?” Reacher asked her.
“Not yet,” Pauling said. “The VA is balking. There are confidentiality issues.”
“Where he lives isn’t a medical diagnosis.”
“That’s the point my friend is making.”
“So what did he have for us?”
Pauling flipped back to the first page of her notes.
“Lane is on an official Pentagon shit list,” she said.
“Why?”
“You know what Operation Just Cause was?”
“Panama,” Reacher said. “Against Manuel Noriega. More than fifteen years ago. I was there, briefly.”
“Lane was there, too. He was still in uniform back then. He did very well there. That’s where he made full colonel. Then he went to the Gulf the first time around and then he quit under a bit of a cloud. But not enough of a cloud to stop the Pentagon hiring him on as a private contractor afterward. They sent him to Colombia, because he had a reputation as a Central and South America expert, because of his performance during Just Cause. He took the beginnings of his present crew with him to fight one of the cocaine cartels. He took our government’s money to do it but when he got there he also took the target cartel’s money to go wipe out one of their rival cartels instead. The Pentagon wasn’t all that upset because one cartel is as bad as another to them, but they never really trusted Lane afterward and never hired him again.”
“His guys said they’d been to Iraq and Afghanistan.”
Pauling nodded. “After the Twin Towers all kinds of people went all kinds of places. Including Lane’s crew. But only as subcontractors. In other words the Pentagon hired someone they trusted and that someone laid off some of the work to Lane.”
“And that was acceptable?”
“Honor was observed. The Pentagon never wrote another check with Lane’s name on it after that first time in Colombia. But later on they needed all the warm bodies they could get, so they looked the other way.”
“He’s been getting steady work,” Reacher said. “Plenty of income. He lives like a king and most of the African money is still in its original wrappers.”
“That just shows you how big this whole racket has gotten. My guy says since Colombia, Lane has been living off the crumbs from other men’s tables. That’s been his only option. Big crumbs at first, but they’re getting smaller. There’s a lot of competition now. Apparently he got rich that one time in Africa, but whatever is left from that payment is basically all the capital he’s got.”
“He makes out like he’s the big dog. He told me he had no rivals or partners.”
“Then he was lying. Or maybe in a sense he was telling the truth. Because he’s at the bottom of the pile. Strictly speaking he has no equals. Only superiors.”
“Was he subcontracting in Burkina Faso, too?” Reacher asked.
“He must have been,” Pauling said. “Otherwise why isn’t he in the records as a principal?”
“Was our government involved there?”
“It’s possible. Certainly my official friend seems a little tense.”
Reacher nodded. “That’s why he’s helping, isn’t it? This is not one MP to another. This is a bureaucracy trying to control the situation. Trying to manage the flow of information. This is someone deciding to feed us stuff privately so we don’t go blundering about and making a lot of noise in public.”
Pauling said nothing. Then her phone went off again. She tried to pick it up with the charger attached but the wire was too short. She unclipped it and answered. Listened for fifteen seconds and turned to a new page in her pad and wrote a dollar sign, and then two numbers, and then six zeroes. She clicked off the phone and spun the pad around so that Reacher could see what she had written.
“Twenty-one million dollars,” she said. “In cash. That’s how rich Lane got in Africa.”
“You were right,” Reacher said. “Big crumbs. Not too shabby for a subcontractor.”
Pauling nodded. “The whole deal was worth a hundred and five million. U.S. dollars in cash from their government’s central reserve. Lane got twenty percent in exchange for supplying half the manpower and agreeing to do most of the work.”
; “Beggars can’t be choosers,” Reacher said.
Then he said: “OK.”
“OK what?”
“What’s half of twenty-one?”
“Ten and a half.”
“Exactly. Kate’s ransom was exactly half of the Burkina Faso payment.”
Silence in the room.
“Ten and a half million dollars,” Reacher said. “It always was a weird amount. But now it makes some kind of sense. Lane probably skimmed fifty percent as his profit. So Hobart got home and figured he was entitled to Lane’s share for his suffering.”
“Reasonable,” Pauling said.
“I would have wanted more,” Reacher said. “I would have wanted all of it.”
* * *
Pauling slid her fingernail down the fine print on the H page of the phone book and used the speaker to try the first two Hobart numbers again. She got the same two answering machines. She hung up. Her little office went quiet. Then her cell buzzed again. This time she unclipped the charger first and flipped the phone open. Said her name and listened for a moment and then turned to another fresh page in her yellow pad and wrote just three lines.
Then she closed her phone.
“We have his address,” she said.
CHAPTER 35
PAULING SAID, “HOBART moved in with his sister. To a building on Hudson Street that I’m betting is on the block between Clarkson and Leroy.”
“A married sister,” Reacher said. “Otherwise we would have found her name in the phone book.”
“Widowed,” Pauling said. “I guess she kept her married name, but she lives alone now. Or at least she did, until her brother came home from Africa.”
The widowed sister was called Dee Marie Graziano and she was right there in the phone book at an address on Hudson. Pauling dialed up a city tax database and confirmed her domicile.
“Rent-stabilized,” she said. “Been there ten years. Even with the cheap lease it’s going to be a small place.” She copied Dee Marie’s Social Security number and pasted it into a box in a different database. “Thirty-eight years old. Marginal income. Doesn’t work much. Doesn’t even get close to paying federal income taxes. Her late husband was a Marine, too. Lance Corporal Vincent Peter Graziano. He died three years ago.”
“In Iraq?”
“I can’t tell.” Pauling closed the databases and opened Google and typed Dee Marie Graziano. Hit the return key. Glanced at the results and something about them made her click off Google and open LexisNexis. The screen rolled down and came up with a whole page of citations.
“Well, look at this,” she said.
“Tell me,” Reacher said.
“She sued the government. State and the DoD.”
“For what?”
“For news about her brother.”
Pauling hit the print button and fed Reacher the pages one by one as they came off the machine. He read the hard copy and she read the screen. Dee Marie Graziano had waged a five-year campaign to find out what had happened to her brother Clay James Hobart. It had been a long, hard, bitter campaign. That was for sure. At the outset Hobart’s employer Edward Lane of Operational Security Consultants had signed an affidavit swearing that Hobart had been a subcontractor for the United States Government at the relevant time. So Dee Marie had gone ahead and petitioned her congressman and both her senators. She had called out of state to the chairmen of the Armed Services Committees in both the House and the Senate. She had written to newspapers and talked to journalists. She had been prepped for the Larry King show but had been canceled prior to the recording. She had hired an investigator, briefly. Finally she had found a pro bono lawyer and sued the Department of Defense. The Pentagon had denied any knowledge of Clay James Hobart’s activities subsequent to his last day in a USMC uniform. Then Dee Marie had sued the Department of State. Some fifth-rung State lawyer had come back and promised that Hobart would be put on file as a tourist missing in West Africa. So Dee Marie had gone back to pestering journalists and had filed a string of Freedom of Information Act petitions. More than half of them had already been denied and the others were still choked in red tape.
“She was really going at it,” Pauling said. “Wasn’t she? Metaphorically she was lighting a candle for her brother every single day for five years.”
“Like Patti Joseph,” Reacher said. “This is a tale of two sisters.”
“The Pentagon knew Hobart was alive after twelve months. And they knew where he was. But they kept quiet for four years. They let this poor woman suffer.”
“What was she going to do anyway? Lock and load and go to Africa and rescue him single-handed? Bring him back to stand trial for Anne Lane’s homicide?”
“There was never any evidence against him.”
“Whatever, keeping her in the dark was probably the best policy.”
“Spoken like a true military man.”
“Like the FBI is a fount of free information?”
“She could have gone over there and petitioned the new government in Burkina Faso personally.”
“That only works in the movies.”
“You’re very cynical, you know that?”
“I don’t have a cynical bone in my body. I’m realistic, is all. Shit happens.”
Pauling went quiet.
“What?” Reacher said.
“You said lock and load. You said Dee Marie could lock and load and go to Africa.”
“No, I said she couldn’t.”
“But we agree that Hobart picked up a new partner, right?” she said. “As soon as he got back? One that he trusts, and real fast?”
“Clearly,” Reacher said.
“Could it be the sister?”
Reacher said nothing.
“The trust would be there,” Pauling said. “Wouldn’t it? Automatically? And she was there, which would explain the speed. And the commitment would have been there, on her part. Commitment, and a lot of anger. So is it possible that the voice you heard on the car phone was a woman?”
Reacher was quiet for a beat.
“It’s possible,” he said. “I guess. I mean, it never struck me that way. Never. But that could just be a preconception on my part. An unconscious bias. Because those machines are tough. They could make Minnie Mouse sound like Darth Vader.”
“You said there was a lightness to the voice. Like a small man.”
Reacher nodded. “Yes, I did.”
“Therefore like a woman. With the pitch altered an octave, it’s plausible.”
“It could be,” Reacher said. “Certainly whoever it was knew the West Village streets pretty well.”
“Like a ten-year resident would. Plus military jargon, from having had a husband and a brother in the Marine Corps.”
“Maybe,” Reacher said. “Gregory told me a woman showed up in the Hamptons. A fat woman.”
“Fat?”
“Gregory said heavyset.”
“Surveillance?”
“No, she and Kate talked. They went walking on the beach.”
“Maybe it was Dee Marie. Maybe she’s fat. Maybe she was asking for money. Maybe Kate blew her off and that was the last straw.”
“This is about more than money.”
“But that doesn’t mean this isn’t at least partly about money,” Pauling said. “And judging by where she’s living Dee Marie needs money. Her share would be more than five million dollars. She might think of it like compensation. For five years of stonewalling. A million dollars a year.”
“Maybe,” Reacher said again.
“It’s a hypothesis,” Pauling said. “We shouldn’t rule it out.”
“No,” Reacher said. “We shouldn’t.”
Pauling pulled a city directory off her shelf and checked the Hudson Street address.
“They’re south of Houston,” she said. “Between Vandam and Charlton. Not between Clarkson and Leroy. We were wrong.”
“Maybe they like a bar a few blocks north,” Reacher said. “He couldn’t have called himself Charlt
on Vandam anyway. That’s way too phony.”
“Whatever, they’re only fifteen minutes from here.”
“Don’t get your hopes up. This is another brick in the wall, that’s all. One or both of them, whichever, they must be long gone already. They’d be crazy to stick around.”
“You think?”
“They’ve got blood on their hands and money in their pockets, Pauling. They’ll be in the Caymans by now. Or Bermuda, or Venezuela, or wherever the hell people go these days.”
“So what do we do?”
“We head over to Hudson Street, and we hope like crazy that the trail is still a little bit warm.”
CHAPTER 36
BETWEEN THEM IN their previous lives and afterward Reacher and Pauling had approached probably a thousand buildings that may or may not have contained hostile suspects. They knew exactly how to do it. There was efficient back-and-forth tactical discussion. They were coming from a position of weakness, in that neither of them was armed and Hobart had met Pauling twice before. She had interviewed Lane’s whole crew at length after Anne Lane’s disappearance. Chances were Hobart would remember her even after the traumatic five-year interval. Balancing those disadvantages was Reacher’s strong conviction that the Hudson Street apartment would be empty. He expected to find nothing there except hastily tossed closets and one last can of rotting trash.
There was no doorman. It wasn’t that kind of a building. It was a boxy five-story tenement faced with dull red brick and a black iron fire escape. It was the last hold-out on a block full of design offices and bank branches. It had a chipped black door with an aluminum squawk box chiseled sideways into the frame. Ten black buttons. Ten nametags. Graziano was written neatly against 4L.
“Walk-up,” Pauling said. “Central staircase. Long thin front-to-back apartments, two to a floor, one on the left, one on the right. Four-L will be on the fourth floor, on the left.”
Reacher tried the door. It was locked and solid.
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