by Lee Child
The name of the supervising cardiologist was the only constant feature throughout the paperwork, a Dr. McBannerman, who Reacher pictured in his mind as a kindly old guy, white hair, erudite, wise and sympathetic, maybe of ancient Scottish extraction, until Jodie told him she had met with her several times and she was a woman from Baltimore aged about thirty-five. He was driving Jodie’s jeep around the small, curving roads, while she was scanning left and right for the correct office. She recognized it at the end of a cul-de-sac, a low brick structure, white trim, somehow glowing with an antiseptic halo like medical buildings do. There were a half dozen cars parked outside, with one spare slot which Reacher backed into.
The receptionist was a heavy old busybody who welcomed Jodie with a measure of sympathy. She invited them to wait in McBannerman’s inner office, which earned them glares from the other patients in the waiting room. The inner office was an inoffensive place, pale and sterile and silent, with a token examination table and a large colored cutaway diagram of the human heart on the wall behind the desk. Jodie was staring up at it like she was asking so which part finally failed? Reacher could feel his own heart, huge and muscular and thumping gently in his chest. He could feel the blood pumping and the pulses ticking in his wrists and his neck.
They waited like that for ten minutes, and then the inner door opened and Dr. McBannerman stepped in, a plain dark-haired woman in a white coat, a stethoscope around her neck like a badge of office, and concern in her face.
“Jodie,” she said, “I’m terribly sorry about Leon.”
It was 99 percent genuine, but there was a stray edge of worry there, too. She’s worried about a malpractice suit, Reacher thought. The patient’s daughter was a lawyer, and she was right there in her office straight from the funeral ceremony. Jodie caught it, too, and she nodded, a reassuring little gesture.
“I just came to say thank you. You were absolutely wonderful, every step of the way. He couldn’t have had better care.”
McBannerman relaxed. The one percent of worry washed away. She smiled and Jodie glanced up at the big diagram again.
“So which part finally failed?” she asked.
McBannerman followed her gaze and shrugged gently.
“Well, all of it, really, I’m afraid. It’s a big complex muscle, it beats and it beats, thirty million times a year. If it lasts twenty-seven hundred million beats, which is ninety years, we call it old age. If it lasts only eighteen hundred million beats, sixty years, we call it premature heart disease. We call it America’s biggest health problem, but really all we’re saying is sooner or later, it just stops going.”
She paused and looked directly at Reacher. For a second he thought she had spotted some symptom he was displaying. Then he realized she was waiting for an introduction.
“Jack Reacher,” he said. “I was an old friend of Leon’s.”
She nodded slowly, like a puzzle had just been solved.
“The famous Major Reacher. He spoke about you, often.”
She sat and looked at him, openly interested. She scanned his face, and then her eyes settled on his chest. He wasn’t sure if that was because of her professional specialty, or if she was looking at the scorch mark from the muzzle blast.
“Did he speak about anything else?” Jodie asked. “I got the impression he was concerned about something.”
McBannerman turned to her, puzzled, like she was thinking well, all of my patients are concerned about something, like life and death.
“What sort of thing?”
“I don’t really know,” Jodie said. “Maybe something one of the other patients might have involved him with?”
McBannerman shrugged and looked blank, like she was about to dismiss it, but then they saw her remember.
“Well, he did mention something. He told me he had a new task.”
“Did he say what it was?”
McBannerman shook her head.
“He mentioned no details. Initially, it seemed to bore him. He was reluctant about it, at first. Like somebody had landed him with something tedious. But then he got a lot more interested, later. It got to where it was overstimulating him. His EKGs were way up, and I wasn’t at all happy about it.”
“Was it connected to another patient?” Reacher asked her.
She shook her head again.
“I really don’t know. It’s possible, I guess. They spend a lot of time together, out there in reception. They talk to each other. They’re old people, often bored and lonely, I’m afraid.”
It sounded like a rebuke. Jodie blushed.
“When did he first mention it?” Reacher asked, quickly.
“March?” McBannerman said. “April? Soon after he became an outpatient, anyway. Not long before he went to Hawaii.”
Jodie stared at her, surprised. “He went to Hawaii? I didn’t know that.”
McBannerman nodded. “He missed an appointment and I asked him what had happened, and he said he’d been to Hawaii, just a couple of days.”
“Hawaii? Why would he go to Hawaii without telling me?”
“I don’t know why he went,” McBannerman said.
“Was he well enough to travel?” Reacher asked her.
She shook her head.
“No, and I think he knew it was silly. Maybe that’s why he didn’t mention it.”
“When did he become an outpatient?” Reacher asked.
“Beginning of March,” she said.
“And when did he go to Hawaii?”
“Middle of April, I think.”
“OK,” he said. “Can you give us a list of your other patients during that period? March and April? People he might have talked to?”
McBannerman was already shaking her head.
“No, I’m sorry, I really can’t do that. It’s a confidentiality issue.”
She appealed to Jodie with her eyes, doctor to lawyer, woman to woman, a you-know-how-it-is sort of a look. Jodie nodded, sympathetically.
“Maybe you could just ask your receptionist? You know, see if she saw Dad talking with one of the others out there? That would just be conversational, third-party, no confidentiality issues involved. In my opinion, certainly.”
McBannerman recognized an impasse when she saw one. She buzzed the intercom and asked the receptionist to step inside. The woman was asked the question, and she started nodding busily and answering before it was even finished.
“Yes, of course, Mr. Garber was always talking to that nice elderly couple, you know, the man with the dodgy valve? Upper right ventricle? Can’t drive anymore so his wife brings him in every time? In that awful old car? Mr. Garber was doing something for them, I’m absolutely sure of it. They were always showing him old photographs and pieces of paper.”
“The Hobies?” McBannerman asked her.
“That’s right, they all got to be thick as thieves together, the three of them, Mr. Garber and old Mr. and Mrs. Hobie.”
6
HOOK HOBIE WAS alone in his inner office, eighty-eight floors up, listening to the quiet background sounds of the giant building, thinking hard, changing his mind. He was not an inflexible guy. He prided himself on that. He admired the way he could change and adapt and listen and learn. He felt it gave him his edge, made him distinctive.
He had gone to Vietnam more or less completely unaware of his capabilities. More or less completely unaware of everything, because he had been very young. And not just very young, but also straight out of a background that was repressed and conducted in a quiet suburban vacuum that held no scope for anything much in the way of experience.
Vietnam changed him. It could have broken him. It broke plenty of other guys. All around him, there were guys going to pieces. Not just the kids like him, but the older guys, too, the long-service professionals who had been in the Army for years. Vietnam fell on people like a weight, and some of them cracked, and some of them didn’t.
He didn’t. He just looked around, and changed and adapted. Listened and learned. Killing was easy.
He was a guy who had never seen anything dead before apart from roadkill, the chipmunks and the rabbits and the occasional stinking skunk on the leafy lanes near his home. First day in-country in ‘Nam he saw eight American corpses. It was a foot patrol neatly triangulated by mortar fire. Eight men, twenty-nine pieces, some of them large. A defining moment. His buddies were going quiet and throwing up and groaning in sheer abject miserable disbelief. He was unmoved.
He started out as a trader. Everybody wanted something. Everybody was moaning about what they didn’t have. It was absurdly easy. All it took was a little listening. Here was a guy who smoked but didn’t drink. There was a guy who loved beer but didn’t smoke. Take the cigarettes from the one guy and exchange them for the other guy’s beer. Broker the deal. Keep a small percentage back for yourself. It was so easy and so obvious he couldn’t believe they weren’t doing it for themselves. He didn’t take it seriously, because he was sure it couldn’t last. It wasn’t going to take long for them all to catch on, and cut him out as middle-man.
But they never caught on. It was his first lesson. He could do things other people couldn’t. He could spot things they couldn’t. So he listened harder. What else did they want? Lots of things. Girls, food, penicillin, records, duty at base camp, but not latrine duty. Boots, bug repellent, side arms plated with chromium, dried ears from VC corpses for souvenirs. Marijuana, aspirin, heroin, clean needles, safe duty for the last hundred days of a tour. He listened and learned and searched and skimmed.
Then he made his big breakthrough. It was a conceptual leap he always looked back on with tremendous pride. It served as a pattern for the other giant strides he made later. It came as a response to a couple of problems he was facing. First problem was the sheer hard work everything was causing him. Finding specific physical things was sometimes tricky. Finding undiseased girls became very difficult, and finding virgins became impossible. Getting hold of a steady supply of drugs was risky. Other things were tedious. Fancy weapons, VC souvenirs, even decent boots all took time to obtain. Fresh new officers on rotation were screwing up his sweet-heart deals in the safe noncombat zones.
The second problem was competition. It was coming to his attention that he wasn’t unique. Rare, but not unique. Other guys were getting in the game. A free market was developing. His deals were occasionally rejected. People walked away, claiming a better trade was available elsewhere. It shocked him.
Change and adapt. He thought it through. He spent an evening on his own, lying in his narrow cot in his hooch, thinking hard. He made the breakthrough. Why chase down specific physical things that were already hard to find, and could only get harder? Why trek on out to some medic and ask what he wanted in exchange for a boiled and stripped Charlie skull? Why then go out and barter for whatever damn thing it was and bring it back in and pick up the skull? Why deal in all that stuff? Why not just deal in the commonest and most freely available commodity in the whole of Vietnam?
American dollars. He became a moneylender. He smiled about it later, ruefully, when he was convalescing and had time to read. It was an absolutely classic progression. Primitive societies start out with barter, and then they progress to a cash economy. The American presence in Vietnam had started out as a primitive society. That was for damn sure. Primitive, improvised, disorganized, just crouching there on the muddy surface of that awful country. Then as time passed it became bigger, more settled, more mature. It grew up, and he was the first of his kind to grow up with it. The first, and for a very long time, the only. It was a source of huge pride to him. It proved he was better than the rest. Smarter, more imaginative, better able to change and adapt and prosper.
Cash money was the key to everything. Somebody wanted boots or heroin or a girl some lying gook swore was twelve and a virgin, he could go buy it with money borrowed from Hobie. He could gratify his desire today, and pay for it next week, plus a few percent in interest. Hobie could just sit there, like a fat lazy spider in the center of a web. No legwork. No hassle. He put a lot of thought into it. Realized early the psychological power of numbers. Little numbers like nine sounded small and friendly. Nine percent was his favorite rate. It sounded like nothing at all. Nine, just a little squiggle on a piece of paper. A single figure. Less than ten. Really nothing at all. That’s how the other grunts looked at it. But 9 percent a week was 468 percent a year. Somebody let the debt slip for a week, and compound interest kicked in. That 468 ramped up to 1,000 percent pretty damn quickly. But nobody looked at that. Nobody except Hobie. They all saw the number nine, single figure, small and friendly.
The first defaulter was a big guy, savage, ferocious, pretty much subnormal in the head. Hobie smiled. Forgave him his debt and wrote it off. Suggested that he might repay this generosity by getting alongside him and taking on the role of enforcer. There were no more defaulters after that. The exact method of deterrence was tricky to establish. A broken arm or leg just sent the guy way back behind the lines to the field hospital, where he was safe and surrounded by white nurses who would probably put out if he came up with some kind of heroic description about how he got the injury. A bad break might even get him invalided out of the service altogether and returned Stateside. No kind of deterrence in that. No kind of deterrence at all. So Hobie had his enforcer use punji spikes. They were a VC invention, a small sharp wooden spike like a meat skewer, coated with buffalo dung, which was poisonous. The VC concealed them in shallow holes, so GIs would step on them and get septic crippling wounds in the feet. Hobie’s enforcer aimed to use them through the defaulter’s testicles. The feeling amongst Hobie’s clientele was the long-term medical consequences were not worth risking, even in exchange for escaping the debt and getting out of uniform.
By the time he got burned and lost his arm, Hobie was a seriously rich man. His next coup was to get the whole of his fortune home, undetected and complete. Not everybody could have done it. Not in the particular set of circumstances he found himself in. It was further proof of his greatness. As was his subsequent history. He arrived in New York after a circuitous journey, crippled and disfigured, and immediately felt at home. Manhattan was a jungle, no different from the jungles of Indochina. So there was no reason for him to start acting any different. No reason to change his line of business. And this time, he was starting out with a massive capital reserve. He wasn’t starting out with nothing.
He loan-sharked for years. He built it up. He had the capital, and he had the image. The burn scars and the hook meant a lot, visually. He attracted a raft of helpers. He fed off whole identifiable waves and generations of immigrants and poor people. He fought off the Italians to stay in business. He paid off whole squads of cops and prosecutors to stay invisible.
Then he made his second great breakthrough. Similar to the first. It was a process of deep radical thought. A response to a problem. The problem was the sheer insane scale. He had millions on the street, but it was all nickel-and-dime. Thousands of separate deals, a hundred bucks here, a hundred fifty there, 9 or 10 percent a week, 500 or a 1,000 percent a year. Big paperwork, big hassles, running fast all the time just to keep up. Then he suddenly realized less could be more. It came to him in a flash. Five percent of some corporation’s million bucks was worth more in a week than 500 percent of street-level shit. He got in a fever about it. He froze all new lending and turned the screws to get back everything he was owed. He bought suits and rented office space. Overnight, he became a corporate lender.
It was an act of pure genius. He had sniffed out that gray margin that lies just to the left of conventional commercial practice. He had found a huge constituency of borrowers who were just slipping off the edge of what the banks called acceptable. A huge constituency. A desperate constituency. Above all, a soft constituency. Soft targets. Civilized men in suits coming to him for a million bucks, posing much less of a risk than somebody in a dirty undershirt wanting a hundred in a filthy tenement block with a rabid dog behind the door. Soft targets, easy to intimidate. Unaccustomed to the harsh reali
ties of life. He let his enforcers go, and sat back and watched as his clientele shrank down to a handful, his average loan increased a millionfold, his interest rates dropped back into the stratosphere, and his profits grew bigger than he could ever imagine. Less is more.
It was a wonderful new business to be in. There were occasional problems, of course. But they were manageable. He changed his deterrence tactic. These civilized new borrowers were vulnerable through their families. Wives, daughters, sons. Usually, the threat was enough. Occasionally, action had to be taken. Often, it was fun. Soft suburban wives and daughters could be amusing. An added bonus. A wonderful business. Achieved through a constant willingness to change and adapt. Deep down, he knew his talent for flexibility was his greatest strength. He had promised himself never ever to forget that fact. Which was why he was alone in his inner office, up there on the eighty-eighth floor, listening to the quiet background sounds of the giant building, thinking hard, and changing his mind.
FIFTY MILES AWAY to the north, in Pound Ridge, Marilyn Stone was changing her mind, too. She was a smart woman. She knew Chester was in financial trouble. It couldn’t be anything else. He wasn’t having an affair. She knew that. There are signs husbands give out when they’re having affairs, and Chester wasn’t giving them out. There was nothing else he could be worried about. So it was financial trouble.
Her original intention had been to wait. Just to sit tight and wait until the day he finally needed to get it off his chest and told her all about it. She had planned to wait for that day and then step in. She could manage the situation from there on in, however far it went exactly, debt, insolvency, even bankruptcy. Women were good at managing situations. Better than men. She could take the practical steps, she could offer whatever consolation was needed, she could pick her way through the ruins without the ego-driven hopelessness Chester was going to be feeling.