by Lee Child
“What’s in Venezuela?” I asked him.
He shrugged across at me.
“Lots of things, right?” he said.
“Kliner’s chemical works,” I said. “It relocated there after the EPA problem.”
“So?” he said.
“So what does it do?” I asked him. “What’s that chemical plant for?”
“Something to do with cotton,” he said.
“Right,” I said. “Involving sodium hydroxide, sodium hypochlorite, chlorine and water. What do you get when you mix all those chemicals together?”
He shrugged. The guy was a cop, not a chemist.
“Bleach,” I said. “Bleach, pretty strong, specially for cotton fiber.”
“So?” he said again.
“What did Bartholomew’s guy tell you about currency paper?” I asked him.
Finlay inhaled sharply. It was practically a gasp.
“Christ,” he said. “Currency paper is mostly cotton fiber. With a bit of linen. They’re bleaching the dollar bills. My God, Reacher, they’re bleaching the ink off. I don’t believe it. They’re bleaching the ink off the singles and giving themselves forty million sheets of genuine blank paper to play with.”
I grinned at him and he held out his right hand. We smacked a high five and whooped at each other, alone in the speeding car.
“You got it, Harvard guy,” I said. “That’s how they’re doing it. No doubt about that. They’ve figured out the chemistry and they’re reprinting the blank bills as hundreds. That’s what Joe meant. E Unum Pluribus. Out of one comes many. Out of one dollar comes a hundred dollars.”
“Christ,” Finlay said again. “They’re bleaching the ink off. This is something else, Reacher. And you know what this all means? Right now, that warehouse is stuffed full to the ceiling with forty tons of genuine dollar bills. There’s forty million dollars in there. Forty tons, all piled up, waiting for the Coast Guard to pull back. We’ve caught them with their pants down, right?”
I laughed, happily.
“Right,” I said. “Their pants are down around their ankles. Their asses are hanging out in the breeze. That’s what they were so worried about. That’s why they’re panicking.”
Finlay shook his head. Grinned at the windshield.
“How the hell did you figure this out?” he asked.
I didn’t answer right away. We drove on. The highway was hoisting us through the gathering sprawl of Atlanta’s southern edge. Blocks were filling up. Construction and commerce were busy confirming the Sunbelt’s growing strength. Cranes stood ready to shore up the city’s southern wall against the rural emptiness outside.
“We’re going to take this one step at a time,” I said.
“First of all, I’m going to prove it to you. I’m going to show you an air conditioner box stuffed with genuine one-dollar bills.”
“You are?” he said. “Where?”
I glanced across at him.
“In the Stollers’ garage,” I said.
“Christ’s sake, Reacher,” he said. “It got burned down. And there was nothing in it, right? Even if there was, now it’s got the Atlanta PD and fire chiefs swarming all over it.”
“I’ve got no information says it got burned down,” I said.
“What the hell are you talking about?” he said. “I told you, it was on the telex.”
“Where did you go to school?” I asked him.
“What’s that got to do with anything?” he said.
“Precision,” I said. “It’s a habit of mind. It can get reinforced by good schooling. You saw Joe’s computer printout, right?”
Finlay nodded.
“You recall the second-to-last item?” I asked him.
“Stollers’ Garage,” he said.
“Right,” I said. “But think about the punctuation. If the apostrophe was before the final letter, it would mean the garage belonging to one person called Stoller. The singular possessive, they call it in school, right?”
“But?” he said.
“It wasn’t written like that,” I said. “The apostrophe came after the final letter. It meant the garage belonging to the Stollers. The plural possessive. The garage belonging to two people called Stoller. And there weren’t two people called Stoller living at the house out by the golf course. Judy and Sherman weren’t married. The only place we’re going to find two people called Stoller is the little old house where Sherman’s parents live. And they’ve got a garage.”
Finlay drove on in silence. Trawled back to his grade-school grammar.
“You think he stashed a box with his folks?” he said.
“It’s logical,” I said. “The boxes we saw in his own place were empty. But Sherman didn’t know he was going to die last Thursday. So it’s reasonable to assume he had more savings stashed away somewhere else. He thought he was going to live for years without working.”
We were just about into Atlanta. The big interchange was coming up.
“Loop around past the airport,” I told him.
We skirted the city on a raised ribbon of concrete. We passed near the airport. I found my way back to the poor part of town. It was nearly seven thirty in the morning. The place looked pretty good in the soft morning light. The low sun gave it a spurious glow. I found the right street, and the right house, crouching inoffensively behind its hurricane fencing.
We got out of the car and I led Finlay through the gate in the wire fence. Along the straight path to the door. I nodded to him. He pulled his badge and pounded on the door. We heard the hallway floor creak. We heard bolts and chains snapping and clinking. Then the door opened. Sherman Stoller’s mother stood there. She looked awake. Didn’t look like we’d got her out of bed. She didn’t speak. Just stared out at us.
“Morning, Mrs. Stoller,” I said. “Remember me?”
“You’re a police officer,” she said.
Finlay held his badge out toward her. She nodded.
“Better come in,” she said.
We followed her down the hall into the cramped kitchen.
“What can I do for you?” the old lady asked.
“We’d like to see the inside of your garage, ma’am,” Finlay said. “We have reason to believe your son may have placed some stolen property there.”
The woman stood silently in her kitchen for a moment. Then she turned and took a key off a nail on the wall. Handed it to us without a word. Walked off down the narrow hallway and disappeared into another room. Finlay shrugged at me and we went back out the front door and walked around to the garage.
It was a small tumbledown structure, barely big enough for a single car. Finlay used the key on the lock and swung the door open. The garage was empty except for two tall cartons. They were stacked side by side against the end wall. Identical to the empty boxes I’d seen at Sherman Stoller’s new house. Island Air-conditioning, Inc. But these were still sealed with tape. They had long handwritten serial numbers. I took a good look at them. According to those numbers, there was a hundred thousand dollars in each box.
Finlay and I stood there looking at the boxes. Just staring at them. Then I walked over and rocked one out from the wall. Took out Morrison’s knife and popped the blade. Pushed the point under the sealing tape and slit the top open. Pulled up the flaps on the top and pushed the box over.
It landed with a dusty thump on the concrete floor. An avalanche of paper money poured out. Cash fluttered over the floor. A mass of paper money. Thousands and thousands of dollar bills. A river of singles, some new, some crumpled, some in thick rolls, some in wide bricks, some loose and fluttering. The carton spilled its contents and the flood tide of cash reached Finlay’s polished shoes. He crouched down and plunged his hands into the lake of money. He grabbed two random fistfuls of cash and held them up. The tiny garage was dim. Just a small dirty windowpane letting in the pale morning light. Finlay stayed down on the floor with his big hands full of dollar bills. We looked at the money and we looked at each other.
“
How much was in there?” Finlay asked.
I kicked the box over to find the handwritten number. More cash spilled out and fluttered over the floor.
“Nearly a hundred thousand,” I told him.
“What about the other one?” he said.
I looked over at the other box. Read the long hand written number.
“A hundred grand plus change,” I said. “Must be packed tighter.”
He shook his head. Dropped the dollar bills and started swishing his hands through the pile. Then he got up and started kicking it around. Like a kid does with fall leaves. I joined him. We were laughing and kicking great sprays of cash all over the place. The air was thick with it. We were whooping and slapping each other on the back. We were smacking high tens and dancing around in a hundred thousand dollars on a garage floor.
FINLAY REVERSED THE BENTLEY UP TO THE GARAGE DOOR. I kicked the cash into piles and started stuffing it back into the air conditioner box. It wouldn’t all go in. Problem was the tight rolls and bricks had sprung apart. It was just a mess of loose dollar bills. I stood the box upright and crushed the money down as far as I could, but it was hopeless. I must have left about thirty grand on the garage floor.
“We’ll take the sealed box,” Finlay said. “Come back for the rest later.”
“It’s a drop in the bucket,” I said. “We should leave it for the old folks. Like a pension fund. An inheritance from their boy.”
He thought about it. Shrugged, like it didn’t matter. The cash was just lying around like litter. There was so much of it, it didn’t seem like anything at all.
“OK,” he said.
We dragged the sealed box out into the morning light. Heaved it into the Bentley’s trunk. It wasn’t easy. The box was very heavy. A hundred thousand dollars weighs about two hundred pounds. We rested up for a moment, panting. Then we shut the garage door. Left the other hundred grand in there.
“I’m going to call Picard,” Finlay said.
He went back into the old couple’s house to borrow their phone. I leaned against the Bentley’s warm hood and enjoyed the morning sun. Two minutes, he was back out again.
“Got to go to his office,” he said. “Strategy conference.”
He drove. He threaded his way out of the untidy maze of little streets toward the center. Spun the big Bakelite wheel and headed for the towers.
“OK,” he said. “You proved it to me. Tell me how you figured it.”
I squirmed around in the big leather seat to face him.
“I wanted to check Joe’s list,” I said. “That punctuation thing with the Stollers’ garage. But the list had gotten soaked in chlorinated water. All the writing had bleached off.”
He glanced across.
“You put it together from that?” he said.
I shook my head.
“I got it from the Senate report,” I said. “There were a couple of little paragraphs. One was about an old scam in Bogotá. There was another about an operation in Lebanon years ago. They were doing the same thing, bleaching real dollar bills so they could reprint the blank paper.”
Finlay ran a red light. Glanced over at me.
“So Kliner’s idea isn’t original?” he asked.
“Not original at all,” I said. “But those other guys were very small scale. Very low-level stuff. Kliner built it up to a huge scale. Sort of industrial. He’s the Henry Ford of counterfeiting. Henry Ford didn’t invent the automobile, right? But he invented mass production.”
He stopped at the next red light. There was traffic on the cross street.
“The bleaching thing was in the Senate report?” he said. “So how come Bartholomew or Kelstein didn’t get it? They wrote the damn thing, right?”
“I think Bartholomew did get it,” I said. “I think that’s what he finally figured out. That’s what the e-mail was about. He’d just remembered it. It was a very long report. Thousands of pages, written a long time ago. The bleaching thing was just one tiny footnote in a mass of other stuff. And it referred to very small-scale operations. No comparison at all with the volume Kliner’s into. Can’t blame Bartholomew or Kelstein. They’re old guys. No imagination.”
Finlay shrugged. Parked up next to a hydrant in a tow zone.
28
PICARD MET US IN HIS DOUR LOBBY AND TOOK US OFF INTO a side room. We ran through what we knew. He nodded and his eyes gleamed. He was looking at a big case.
“Excellent work, my friends,” he said. “But who are we dealing with now? I think we got to say all these little Hispanic guys are outsiders. They’re the hired help. They’re not concealed. But locally, we still got five out of the original ten hidden away. We haven’t identified them. That could make things very tricky for us. We know about Morrison, Teale, Baker and the two Kliners, right? But who are the other five? Could be anybody down there, right?”
I shook my head at him.
“We only need to ID one more,” I said. “I sniffed out four more last night. There’s only the tenth guy we don’t know.”
Picard and Finlay both sat up.
“Who are they?” Picard said.
“The two gatemen from the warehouse,” I said. “And two more cops. The backup crew from last Friday.”
“More cops?” Finlay said. “Shit.”
Picard nodded. Laid his giant hands palm down on the table.
“OK,” he said. “You guys head back to Margrave right now. Try to stay out of trouble, but if you can’t, then make the arrests. But be very careful of this tenth guy. Could be anybody at all. I’ll be right behind you. Give me twenty minutes to go get Roscoe back, and I’ll see you down there.”
We all stood up. Shook hands all round. Picard headed upstairs and Finlay and I headed back out to the Bentley.
“How?” he asked me.
“Baker,” I said. “He bumped into me last night. I spun him a yarn about going up to Hubble’s place looking for some documentation, then I went up there and waited to see what would happen. Along came the Kliner kid and four of his pals. They came to nail me to Hubble’s bedroom wall.”
“Christ,” he said. “So what happened?”
“I took them out,” I said.
He did his thing of staring sideways at me at ninety miles an hour.
“You took them out?” he said. “You took the Kliner kid out?”
I nodded. He was quiet for a while. Slowed to eighty-five.
“How did it go down?” he asked.
“I ambushed them,” I said. “Three of them, I hit on the head. One of them, I cut his throat. The Kliner kid, I drowned in the swimming pool. That’s how Joe’s list got soaked. Washed all the writing off.”
“Christ,” he said again. “You killed five men. That’s a hell of a thing, Reacher. How do you feel about that?”
I shrugged. Thought about my brother Joe. Thought about him as a tall gawky eighteen-year-old, just off to West Point. Thought about Molly Beth Gordon, holding up her heavy burgundy leather briefcase, smiling at me. I glanced across at Finlay and answered his question with one of my own.
“How do you feel when you put roach powder down?” I asked him.
He shook his head in a spasm like a dog clearing its coat of cold water.
“Only four left,” he said.
He started kneading the old car’s steering wheel like he was a baker making a pastry twist. He looked through the windshield and blew a huge sigh.
“Any feeling for this tenth guy?” he said.
“Doesn’t really matter who it is,” I said. “Right now he’s up at the warehouse with the other three. They’re short of staff now, right? They’ll all be on guard duty overnight. Loading duty tomorrow. All four of them.”
I flicked on the Bentley’s radio. Some big chrome thing. Some kind of a twenty-year-old English make. But it worked. It pulled in a decent station. I sat listening to the music, trying not to fall asleep.
“Unbelievable,” Finlay said. “How the hell did a place like Margrave start up with a thin
g like this?”
“How did it start?” I said. “It started with Eisenhower. It’s his fault.”
“Eisenhower?” he said. “What’s he got to do with it?”
“He built the interstates,” I said. “He killed Margrave. Way back, that old county road was the only road. Everybody and everything had to pass through Margrave. The place was full of rooming houses and bars, people were passing through, spending money. Then the highways got built, and air travel got cheap, and suddenly the town died. It withered away to a dot on the map because the highway missed it by fourteen miles.”
“So it’s the highway’s fault?” he said.
“It’s Mayor Teale’s fault,” I said. “The town sold the land for the warehouses to earn itself some new money, right? Old Teale brokered the deal. But he didn’t have the courage to say no when the new money turned out to be bad money. Kliner was fixing to use it for the scam he was setting up, and old Teale jumped straight into bed with him.”
“He’s a politician,” Finlay said. “They never say no to money. And it was a hell of a lot of money. Teale rebuilt the whole town with it.”
“He drowned the whole town with it,” I said. “The place is a cesspool. They’re all floating around in it. From the mayor right down to the guy who polishes the cherry trees.”
We stopped talking again. I fiddled with the radio dial and heard Albert King tell me if it wasn’t for bad luck, he wouldn’t have no luck at all.
“But why Margrave?” Finlay said again.
Old Albert told me bad luck and trouble’s been his only friend.
“Geography and opportunity,” I said. “It’s in the right place. All kinds of highways meet down here and it’s a straight run on down to the boatyards in Florida. It’s a quiet place and the people who ran the town were greedy scumbags who’d do what they were told.”
He went quiet. Thinking about the torrent of dollar bills rushing south and east. Like a storm drain after a flood. A little tidal wave. A small and harassed workforce in Margrave keeping it rolling on. The slightest hitch and tens of thousands of dollars would back up and jam. Like a sewer. Enough money to drown a whole town in. He drummed his long fingers on the wheel. Drove the rest of the way in silence.