“Your name, sir?”
“Taylor,” Reacher said. He walked away, clear of the busiest areas, and found a quiet spot. He was going to be counting eight hundred thousand dollars in cash and he didn’t want an audience. He dumped himself down in one of a group of four armchairs. He knew from long experience that nobody would try to join him. Nobody ever did. He radiated subliminal stay away signals and sane people obeyed them. Already a nearby family was watching him warily. Two kids and a mother, camped out in the next group of chairs, presumably off of an early flight and waiting for their room to be ready. The mother looked tired and the kids looked fractious. She had unpacked half their stuff, trying to keep them amused. Toys, coloring books, battered teddy bears, a doll missing an arm, battery-driven video games. He could hear the mother’s halfhearted suggestions of how to fill the time: Why don’t you do this? Why don’t you do that? Why don’t you draw a picture of something you’re going to see? Like therapy.
He turned away and watched the door. People came in, a constant stream. Some weary and travel-stained, some busy and bustling. Some with mountains of luggage, some with briefcases only. All kinds of nationalities. In the next group of chairs one kid threw a bear at the other kid’s head. It missed and skidded across the tile and hit Reacher’s foot. He leaned down and picked it up. All the stuffing was out of it. He tossed it back. Heard the mother suggesting some other pointless activity: Why don’t you do this? He thought: Why don’t you shut the hell up and sit still like normal human beings?
He looked back at the door and saw Perez walk in. Then Kowalski. Then Edward Lane himself, third in line. Then Gregory, and Groom, and Addison, and Burke. Roll-on bags, duffels, suit carriers. Jeans and sport coats, black nylon warm-up jackets, ball caps, sneakers. Some shades, some earphones trailing thin wires. Tired from the overnight flight. A little creased and crumpled. But awake and alert and aware. They looked exactly like what they were: a group of Special Forces soldiers trying to travel incognito.
He watched them line up at the desk. Watched them wait. Watched them shuffle up one place at a time. Watched them check in. Watched the clerk give Lane the message. Saw Lane turn around, searching. Lane’s gaze moved over everybody in the lobby. Over Pauling, without stopping. Over the fractious family. Onto Reacher’s own face. It stopped there. Lane nodded. Reacher nodded back. Gregory took a stack of key cards from the clerk and all seven men hoisted their luggage again and started through the lobby. They eased their way through the crowds shoulders first and stopped in a group outside the ring of armchairs. Lane dropped one bag and kept hold of another and sat down opposite Reacher. Gregory sat down too, and Carter Groom took the last chair. Kowalski and Perez and Addison and Burke were left standing, making a perimeter, with Burke and Perez facing outward. Awake and alert and aware, thorough and cautious.
“Show me the money,” Reacher said.
“Tell me where Taylor is,” Lane said.
“You first.”
“Do you know where he is?”
Reacher nodded. “I know where he is. I made visual contact twice. Last night, and then again this morning. Just a few hours ago.”
“You’re good.”
“I know.”
“So tell me where he is.”
“Show me the money first.”
Lane said nothing. In the silence Reacher heard the harassed mother say: Draw a picture of Buckingham Palace. He said, “You called a bunch of London private eyes. Behind my back. You tried to get ahead of me.”
Lane said, “A man’s entitled to save himself an unnecessary expense.”
“Did you get ahead of me?”
“No.”
“Therefore the expense isn’t unnecessary.”
“I guess not.”
“So show me the money.”
“OK,” Lane said. “I’ll show you the money.” He slid the duffel off his knees and placed it on the floor and unzipped it. Reacher glanced right. Glanced left. Saw the kid about to throw the tattered bear again. Saw him catch the expression on Lane’s face and saw him shrink back toward his mother. Reacher shuffled forward on his chair and leaned down. The duffel was full of money. One of the O-Town bales, newly opened, part depleted.
“No trouble on the flight?” he asked.
Lane said, “It was X-rayed. Nobody got their panties in a wad. You’ll get it home OK. Assuming you earn it first.”
Reacher pulled back the torn plastic and put a fingernail under one of the paper bands. It was tight. Therefore full. There were four equal stacks of twenty bricks each. Total of eighty bricks, an even number. A hundred hundreds in each brick. Eighty times a hundred times a hundred was eight hundred thousand.
So far, so good.
He lifted the edge of a bill and rubbed it between his finger and thumb. Glanced across the lobby to the brass sign at the Xerox station: By statute some documents may not be photocopied. But these hadn’t been. They were real. He could feel the engraving. He could smell the paper and the ink. Unmistakable.
“OK,” he said, and sat back.
Lane leaned down and zipped the duffel. “So where is he?”
Reacher said, “First we have to talk.”
“You better be kidding me.”
“There are civilians there. Innocent people. Noncombatants. A family.”
“So?”
“So I can’t have you charging in there like maniacs. I can’t allow collateral damage.”
“There won’t be any.”
“I need to be sure of that.”
“You have my word.”
Reacher said, “Your word ain’t worth shit.”
“We won’t be shooting,” Lane said. “Let’s be clear on that. A bullet is too good for Taylor. We’ll go in and we’ll get him and we’ll bring him out without harming a hair on his or anyone else’s head. Because that’s the way I want it. I want him all in one piece. I want him alive and well and conscious and feeling everything. He’ll tell us about his partner and then he’ll die, long, slow, and hard. Over a week or two. So a gunfight is no good to me. Not because I care about noncombatants, true. But because I don’t want any accidents with Taylor. I would hate to give it to him easy. You can take my word on that.”
“OK,” Reacher said.
“So where is he?”
Reacher paused. Thought about Hobart, and Birmingham, Alabama, and Nashville, Tennessee, and kindly white-haired doctors in lab coats holding artificial limbs.
“He’s in Norfolk,” he said.
“Where’s that?”
“It’s a county, north and east of here. About a hundred and twenty miles.”
“Where in Norfolk?”
“A place called Grange Farm.”
“He’s on a farm?”
“Flat country,” Reacher said. “Like a pool table. With ditches. Easy to defend.”
“Nearest big city?”
“It’s about thirty miles south and west of Norwich.”
“Nearest town?”
Reacher didn’t reply.
“Nearest town?” Lane asked again.
Reacher glanced back at the reception desk. By statute some documents may not be photocopied. He watched a Xerox machine at work, a ghostly stripe of green light cycling horizontally back and forth beneath a lid. He glanced at the harassed mother and heard her voice in his head: Why don’t you draw a picture of something you’re going to see? He looked at the kid’s doll, missing an arm. Heard Dave Kemp’s voice, in the country store: It felt like a thin book. Not many pages. A rubber band around it. Recalled the tiny imperceptible impact of the kid’s tattered bear skidding on the tile and landing against his shoe.
Lane said, “Reacher?”
Reacher heard Lauren Pauling’s voice in his mind: A little is sometimes all you need. Going out, they don’t care as much as when you’re coming in.
Lane said, “Reacher? Hello? What’s the nearest town?”
Reacher dragged his focus back from the middle distance, slowly, carefully, painfully, and he looke
d directly into Lane’s eyes. He said, “The nearest town is called Fenchurch Saint Mary. I’ll show you exactly where it is. Be ready to leave in one hour. I’ll come back for you.”
Then he stood up and concentrated hard on walking infinitely slowly across the lobby floor. One foot in front of the other. Left, then right. He caught Pauling’s eye. Walked out the door. Down the concrete steps. He made it to the sidewalk.
Then he ran like hell for the parking garage.
CHAPTER 63
REACHER HAD PARKED the car, so he still had the keys. He blipped the door from thirty feet away and wrenched it open and threw himself inside. Jammed the key in the ignition and started the motor and shoved the stick in reverse. Stamped on the gas and hurled the tiny car out of the parking space and braked hard and spun the wheel and took off again forward with the front tires howling and smoking. He threw a ten-pound note at the barrier guy and didn’t wait for the change. Just hit the gas as soon as the pole was raised forty-five degrees. He blasted up the ramp and shot straight across two lanes of oncoming traffic and jammed to a stop on the opposite curb because he saw Pauling hurrying toward him. He threw open her door and she slid inside and he took off again and he was twenty yards down the road before she got the door closed behind her.
“North,” he said. “Which way is north?”
“North? North is behind us,” she said. “Go around the traffic circle.”
Hyde Park Corner. He blew through two red lights and swerved the car like a dodgem from one lane to another. Came all the way around and back onto Park Lane in the other direction doing more than sixty miles an hour. Practically on two wheels.
“Where now?” he said.
“What the hell is going on?”
“Just get me out of town.”
“I don’t know how.”
“Use the atlas. There’s a city plan.”
Reacher dodged buses and taxis. Pauling turned pages, frantically.
“Go straight,” she said.
“Is that north?”
“It’ll get us there.”
They made it through Marble Arch with the engine screaming. They got green lights all the way past the Marylebone Road. They made it into Maida Vale. Then Reacher slowed a little. Breathed out for what felt like the first time in half an hour.
“Where next?”
“Reacher, what happened?”
“Just give me directions.”
“Make a right onto St. John’s Wood Road,” Pauling said. “That will take us back to Regent’s Park. Then make a left and go out the same way we came in. And please tell me exactly what the hell is going on.”
“I made a mistake,” Reacher said. “Remember I told you I couldn’t shake the feeling I was making a bad mistake? Well, I was wrong. It wasn’t a bad mistake. It was a catastrophic mistake. It was the biggest single mistake ever made in the history of the cosmos.”
“What mistake?”
“Tell me about the photographs in your apartment.”
“What about them?”
“Nieces and nephews, right?”
“Lots of them,” Pauling said.
“You know them well?”
“Well enough.”
“Spend time with them?”
“Plenty.”
“Tell me about their favorite toys.”
“Their toys? I don’t really know about their toys. I can’t keep up. X-boxes, video games, whatever. There’s always something new.”
“Not the new stuff. Their old favorites. Tell me about their favorite old toys. What would they have run into a fire to save? When they were eight years old?”
“When they were eight years old? I guess a teddy bear or a doll. Something they’d had since they were tiny.”
“Exactly,” Reacher said. “Something comforting and familiar. Something they loved. The kind of thing they would want to take on a journey. Like the family next to me in the lobby just now. The mother got them all out of the suitcase to quiet them down.”
“So?”
“What did those things look like?”
“Like bears and dolls, I guess.”
“No, later. When the kids were eight years old.”
“When they were eight? They’d had them forever by then. They looked like crap.”
Reacher nodded at the wheel. “The bears all worn, with the stuffing out? The dolls all chipped, with the arms off?”
“Yes, like that. All kids have toys like that.”
“Jade didn’t. That’s precisely what was missing from her room. There were new bears and new dolls. Recent things she hadn’t taken to. But there were no old favorites there.”
“What are you saying?”
“I’m saying that if Jade had been kidnapped on the way to Bloomingdale’s on a normal everyday morning I would have found all her favorite old toys still in her room afterward. But I didn’t.”
“But what does that mean?”
“It means Jade knew she was leaving. It means she packed.”
* * *
Reacher made the left at Regent’s Park and headed north, toward the M-1, which would carry them all the way back to the M-25 beltway. After the turn he drove on a little more sedately. He didn’t want to get arrested by any English traffic cops. He didn’t have time for that. He figured he was right then about two hours ahead of Edward Lane. It would take an hour for Lane to realize he had been ditched, and then it would take at least another hour for him to get hold of a car and organize a pursuit. So, two hours. Reacher would have liked more, but he figured two hours might be enough.
Might be.
Pauling said, “Jade packed?”
“Kate packed, too,” Reacher said.
“What did Kate pack?”
“Just one thing. But her most precious thing. Her best memory. The photograph with her daughter. From the bedroom. One of the most beautiful photographs I’ve ever seen.”
Pauling paused a beat.
“But you saw it,” she said. “She didn’t take it.”
Reacher shook his head. “I saw a photocopy. From Staples, color digital, laser, two bucks a sheet. Brought home and slipped into the frame. It was very good, but not quite good enough. A little vivid in the colors, a little plastic in the contours.”
“But who packs for a kidnap? I mean, who the hell gets the chance?”
“They weren’t kidnapped,” Reacher said. “That’s the thing. They were rescued. They were liberated. They were set free. They’re alive somewhere. Alive and well and happy. A little tense, maybe. But free as birds.”
* * *
They drove on, slow and steady, through the northern reaches of London, through Finchley and Swiss Cottage, toward Hendon.
“Kate believed Dee Marie,” Reacher said. “That’s what happened. Out there in the Hamptons. Dee Marie told her about Anne, and warned her, and Kate believed her. Like Patti Joseph said, there was something about the story and something about her husband that made Kate believe. Maybe she was already feeling the same kind of things that Anne had felt five years before. Maybe she was already planning to go down the same road.”
Pauling said, “You know what this means?”
“Of course I do.”
“Taylor helped them.”
“Of course he did.”
“He rescued them, and he hid them, and he sheltered them, and he risked his life for them. He’s the good guy, not the bad guy.”
Reacher nodded. “And I just told Lane where he is.”
* * *
They made it through Hendon and negotiated their last London traffic circle and joined the M-1 motorway at its southern tip. Reacher hit the gas and forced the little Mini up to ninety-five miles an hour.
Pauling said, “What about the money?”
“Alimony,” Reacher said. “It was the only way Kate was ever going to get any. We thought it was half of the Burkina Faso payment, and it was, but in Kate’s eyes it was also half of their community property. Half of Lane’s capital. She was
entitled to it. She probably put money in, way back. That’s what Lane seems to want his wives for. Apart from their trophy status.”
“Hell of a plan,” Pauling said.
“They probably thought it was the only way. And they were probably right.”
“But they made mistakes.”
“They sure did. If you really want to disappear, you take nothing with you. Absolutely nothing at all. It’s fatal.”
“Who helped Taylor?”
“Nobody.”
“He had an American partner. On the phone.”
“That was Kate herself. You were half-right, days ago. It was a woman using that machine. But not Dee Marie. It was Kate herself. It must have been. They were a team. They collaborated. She did all the talking, because Taylor couldn’t. Not easy for her. Every time Lane wanted to hear her voice for a proof of life she had to pull the machine off the mouthpiece and then put it back on again.”
“Did you really tell Lane where Taylor is?”
“As good as. I didn’t say Bishops Pargeter. I stopped myself just in time. I said Fenchurch Saint Mary instead. But that’s close. And I had already said Norfolk. I had already said thirty miles from Norwich. And I had already said Grange Farm. He’ll be able to work it out. Two minutes, with the right map.”
“He’s way behind us.”
“At least two hours.”
Pauling was quiet for a second.
Reacher said, “What?”
“He’s two hours behind us right now. But he won’t always be. We’re taking the long way around because we don’t know the English roads.”
“Neither does he.”
“But Gregory does.”
* * *
Reacher drove seven exits on the M-1, acutely aware that the road was taking him west of north, not east of north. Then he drove six clockwise exits on the M-25 beltway before finding the M-11. All completely dead time. If Gregory drove Lane straight through the center of London directly to the southern tip of the M-11 he would cut the two-hour deficit by an exactly corresponding amount.
Lee Child - [Jack Reacher 01-16] Page 406