by Lee Child
She chose jeans and a shirt, dressed up with a leather belt and expensive shoes. He took his new jacket out to the hallway and loaded it with the Steyr from the sports bag. He poured twenty loose refills into the opposite pocket. All the metal made the jacket feel heavy. She came out to join him with the leather-bound folder. She was checking Rutter’s address.
“Ready?” she asked.
“As I’ll ever be,” he said.
He made her wait at every stage while he checked ahead. The exact same procedures he had used the day before. Her safety had felt important then. Now it felt vital. But everything was clean and quiet. Empty hallway, empty elevator, empty lobby, empty garage. They got in the Taurus together and she drove it around the block and headed back north and east.
“East River Drive to 1-95 OK with you?” she asked. “Going east, it’s the Cross Bronx Expressway.”
He shrugged and tried to recall the Hertz map. “Then take the Bronx River Parkway north. We need to go to the zoo.”
“The zoo? Rutter doesn’t live near the zoo.”
“Not the zoo, exactly. The Botanical Gardens. Something you need to see.”
She glanced sideways at him and then concentrated on driving. Traffic was heavy, just past the peak of rush hour, but it was moving. They followed the river north and then northwest to the George Washington Bridge and turned their backs on it and headed east into the Bronx. The expressway was slow, but the parkway north was faster, because it was leading out of town and New York was sucking people inward at that hour. Across the barrier, the southbound traffic was snarled.
“OK, where to?” she asked.
“Go past Fordham University. Past the conservatory, and park at the top.”
She nodded and made the lane changes. Fordham slid by on the left, and then the conservatory on the right. She used the museum entrance and found the lot just beyond it. It was mostly empty.
“Now what?”
He took the leather-bound folder with him.
“Just keep an open mind,” he said.
The conservatory was a hundred yards ahead of them. He had read all about it in a free leaflet, the day before. It was named for somebody called Enid Haupt and had cost a fortune to build in 1902, and ten times as much to renovate ninety-five years later, which was money well spent because the result was magnificent. It was huge and ornate, the absolute definition of urban philanthropy expressed in iron and milky white glass.
It was hot and damp inside. Reacher led Jodie around to the place he was looking for. The exotic plants were massed in huge beds bounded by little walls and railings. There were benches set on the edges of the walkways. The milky glass filtered the sunlight to a bright overcast. There was a strong smell of heavy damp earth and pungent blooms.
“What?” she asked. She was partly amused, partly impatient. He found the bench he was looking for and stepped away from it, close to the low wall. He stepped half a pace left, then another, until he was sure.
“Stand here,” he said.
He took her shoulders from behind and moved her into the same position he had just occupied. Ducked his head to her level and checked.
“Stand on tiptoes,” he told her. “Look straight ahead.”
She made herself taller and stared ahead. Her back was straight and her hair was spilled on her shoulders.
“OK,” he said. “Tell me what you see.”
“Nothing,” she said. “Well, plants and things.”
He nodded and opened the leather folder. Took out the glossy photograph of the gray emaciated Westerner, flinching away from his guard’s rifle. He held it out, arm’s length in front of her, just on the edge of her vision. She looked at it.
“What?” she asked again, half-amused, half-frustrated.
“Compare,” he said.
She kept her head still and flicked her eyes left and right between the photograph and the scene in front of her. Then she snatched the picture from him and held it herself, arm’s length in front of her. Her eyes widened and her face went pale.
“Christ,” she said. “Shit, this picture was taken here? Right here? It was, wasn’t it? All these plants are exactly the same.”
He ducked down again and checked once more. She was holding the picture so the shapes of the plants corresponded exactly. A mass of some kind of palm on the left, fifteen feet high, fronds of fern to the right and behind in a tangled spray. The two figures would have been twenty feet into the dense flower bed, picked out by a telephoto lens that compressed the perspective and threw the nearer vegetation out of focus. Well to the rear was a jungle hardwood, which the camera had blurred with distance. It was actually growing in a different bed.
“Shit,” she said again. “Shit, I don’t believe it.”
The light was right, too. The milky glass way above them gave a pretty good impersonation of jungle overcast. Vietnam is a mostly cloudy place. The jagged mountains suck the clouds down, and most people remember the fogs and the mists, like the ground itself is always steaming. Jodie stared between the photo and the reality in front of her, dodging fractionally left and right to get a perfect fit.
“But what about the wire? The bamboo poles? It looks so real.”
“Stage props,” he said. “Three poles, ten yards of barbed wire. How difficult is that to get? They carried it in here, probably all rolled up.”
“But when? How?”
He shrugged. “Maybe early one morning? When the place was still closed? Maybe they know somebody who works here. Maybe they did it while the place was closed for the renovations.”
She was staring at the picture, close up to her eyes. “Wait a damn minute. You can see that bench. You can see the corner of that bench over there.”
She showed him what she meant, with her fingernail placed precisely on the glossy surface of the photograph. There was a tiny square blur, white. It was the corner of an iron bench, off to the right, behind the main scene. The telephoto lens had been framed tight, but not quite tight enough.
“I didn’t spot that,” he said. “You’re getting good at this.”
She turned around to face him. “No, I’m getting good and mad, Reacher. This guy Rutter took eighteen thousand dollars for a faked photograph.”
“Worse than that. He gave them false hope.”
“So what are we going to do?”
“We’re going to pay him a visit,” he said.
They were back at the Taurus sixteen minutes after leaving it. Jodie threaded back toward the parkway, drumming her fingers on the wheel and talking fast. “But you told me you believed it. I said the photo proved the place existed, and you agreed it did. You said you’d been there, not long ago, got about as close as Rutter had.”
“All true,” Reacher said. “I believed the Botanical Gardens existed. I’d just come back from there. And I got as close as Rutter did. I was standing right next to the little wall where he must have taken the picture from.”
“Jesus, Reacher, what is this? A game?”
He shrugged. “Yesterday I didn’t know what it was. I mean in terms of how much I needed to share with you.”
She nodded and smiled through her exasperation. She was remembering the difference between yesterday and today. “But how the hell did he expect to get away with it? The greenhouse in the New York Botanical Gardens, for God’s sake?”
He stretched in his seat. Eased his arms all the way forward to the windshield.
“Psychology,” he said. “It’s the basis of any scam, right? You tell people what they want to hear. Those old folks, they wanted to hear their boy was still alive. So he tells them their boy probably is. So they invest a lot of hope and money, they’re waiting on pins three whole months, he gives them a photo, and basically they’re going to see whatever they want to see. And he was smart. He asked them for the exact name and unit, he wanted existing pictures of the boy, so he could pick out a middle-aged guy roughly the right size and shape for the photo, and he fed them back the right name and the rig
ht unit. Psychology. They see what they want to see. He could have had a guy in a gorilla suit in the picture and they’d have believed it was representative of the local wildlife.”
“So how did you spot it?”
“Same way,” he said. “Same psychology, but in reverse. I wanted to disbelieve it, because I knew it couldn’t be true. So I was looking for something that seemed wrong. It was the fatigues the guy was wearing that did it for me. You notice that? Old worn-out U.S. Army fatigues? This guy went down thirty years ago. There is absolutely no way a set of fatigues would last thirty years in the jungle. They’d have rotted off in six weeks.”
“But why there? What made you look in the Botanical Gardens?”
He spread his fingers against the windshield glass, pushing to ease the tension in his shoulders. “Where else would he find vegetation like that? Hawaii, maybe, but why spend the airfare for three people when it’s available free right on his doorstep?”
“And the Vietnamese boy?”
“Probably a college kid,” he said. “Probably right here at Fordham. Maybe Columbia. Maybe he wasn’t Vietnamese at all. Could have been a waiter from a Chinese restaurant. Rutter probably paid him twenty bucks for the photo. He’s probably got four friends playing the American captives. A big white guy, a small white guy, a big black guy, a small black guy, all the bases covered. All of them bums, so they look thin and haggard. Probably paid them in bourbon. Probably took all the pictures at the same time, uses them as appropriate. He could have sold that exact same picture a dozen times over. Anyone whose missing boy was tall and white, they get a copy. Then he swears them all to secrecy with this government-conspiracy shit, so nobody will ever compare notes afterward.”
“He’s disgusting,” she said.
He nodded. “That’s for damn sure. BNR families are still a big, vulnerable market, I guess, and he’s feeding off it like a maggot.”
“BNR?” she asked.
“Body not recovered,” he said. “That’s what they are. KIA/ BNR. Killed in action, body not recovered.”
“Killed? You don’t believe there are still any prisoners?”
He shook his head.
“There are no prisoners, Jodie,” he said. “Not anymore. That’s all bullshit ”
“You sure?”
“Totally certain.”
“How can you be certain?”
“I just know,” he said. “Like I know the sky is blue and the grass is green and you’ve got a great ass.”
She smiled as she drove. “I’m a lawyer, Reacher. That kind of proof just doesn’t do it for me.”
“Historical facts,” he said. “The story about holding hostages to get American aid is all baloney, for a start. They were planning to come running south down the Ho Chi Minh Trail as soon as we were out of there, which was right against the Paris Accords, so they knew they were never going to get any aid no matter what they did. So they let all the prisoners go in ‘73, a bit slowly, I know, but they let them go. When we left in ‘75, they scooped up about a hundred stragglers, and then they handed them all straight back to us, which doesn’t jibe with any kind of a hostage strategy. Plus they were desperate for us to de-mine their harbors, so they didn’t play silly games.”
“They were slow about returning remains,” she said. “You know, our boys killed in plane crashes or battles. They played silly games about that.”
He nodded. “They didn’t really understand. It was important to us. We wanted two thousand bodies back. They couldn’t understand why. They’d been at war more than forty years, Japanese, French, the U.S., China. They probably lost a million people missing in action. Our two thousand was a drop in the bucket. Plus they were Communists. They didn’t share the value we put on individuals. It’s a psychological thing again. But it doesn’t mean they kept secret prisoners in secret camps.”
“Not a very conclusive argument,” she said dryly.
He nodded again. “Leon’s the conclusive argument. Your old man, and people just like him. I know those people. Brave, honorable people, Jodie. They fought there, and then they rose to power and prominence later. The Pentagon is stuffed full of assholes, I know that as well as anybody, but there were always enough people like Leon around to keep them honest. You answer me a question: If Leon had known there were still prisoners kept back in ’Nam, what would he have done?”
She shrugged. “I don’t know. Something, obviously.”
“You bet your ass something,” he said. “Leon would have torn the White House apart brick by brick, until all those boys were safely back home. But he didn’t. And that’s not because he didn’t know. Leon knew everything there was to know. There’s no way they could have kept a thing like that a secret from all the Leons, not all the time. A big conspiracy lasting six administrations? A conspiracy people like Leon couldn’t sniff out? Forget about it. The Leons of this world never reacted, so it was never happening. That’s conclusive proof, as far as I’m concerned, Jodie.”
“No, that’s faith,” she said.
“Whatever, it’s good enough for me.”
She watched the traffic ahead, and thought about it. Then she nodded, because in the end, faith in her father was good enough for her, too.
“So Victor Hobie’s dead?”
Reacher nodded. “Has to be. Killed in action, body not recovered.”
She drove on, slowly. They were heading south, and the traffic was bad.
“OK, no prisoners, no camps,” she said. “No government conspiracy. So they weren’t government people who were shooting at us and crashing their cars into us.”
“I never thought it was,” he said. “Most government people I met were a lot more efficient than that. I was a government person, in a manner of speaking. You think I’d miss two days in a row?”
She slewed the car right and jammed to a stop on the shoulder. Turned in her seat to face him, blue eyes wide.
“So it must be Rutter,” she said. “Who else can it be? He’s running a lucrative scam, right? And he’s prepared to protect it. He thinks we’re going to expose it. So he’s been looking for us. And now we’re planning to walk right into his arms.”
Reacher smiled.
“Hey, life’s full of dangers,” he said.
MARILYN REALIZED SHE must have fallen asleep, because she woke up stiff and cold with noises coming through the door at her. The bathroom had no window, and she had no idea what time it was. Morning, she guessed, because she felt like she had been asleep for some time. On her left, Chester was staring into space, his gaze fixed a thousand miles beyond the fixtures under the sink. He was inert. She turned and looked straight at him, and got no response at all. On her right, Sheryl was curled on the floor. She was breathing heavily through her mouth. Her nose had turned black and shiny and was swollen. Marilyn stared at her and swallowed. Turned again and pressed her ear to the door. Listened hard.
There were two men out there. The sound of two deep voices, talking low. She could hear elevators in the distance. A very faint traffic rumble, with occasional sirens vanishing into stillness. Aircraft noise, like a big jet from JFK was wheeling away west across the harbor. She eased herself off the floor.
Her shoes had come off during the night. She found them scuffed under her pile of towels. She slipped them on and walked quietly to the sink. Chester was staring straight through her. She checked herself in the mirror. Not too bad, she thought. The last time she had spent the night on a bathroom floor was after a sorority party more than twenty years before, and she looked no worse now than she had then. She combed her hair with her fingers and patted water on her eyes. Then she crept back to the door and listened again.
Two men, but she was pretty sure Hobie wasn’t one of them. There was some equality in the tenor of the voices. It was back-and-forth conversation, not orders and obedience. She slid the pile of towels backward with her foot and took a deep breath and opened the door.
Two men stopped talking and turned to stare at her. The one called
Tony was sitting sideways on the sofa in front of the desk. Another she had not seen before was squatted next to him on the coffee table. He was a thickset man in a dark suit, not tall, but heavy. The desk was not occupied. No sign of Hobie. The window blinds were closed to a crack, but she could see bright sun outside. It was later than she thought. She glanced back to the sofa and saw Tony smiling at her.
“Sleep well?” he asked.
She made no reply. Just kept a neutral look fixed on her face until Tony’s smile died away. Score one, she thought.
“I talked things over with my husband,” she lied.
Tony looked at her, expectantly, waiting for her to speak again. She let him wait. Score two, she thought.
“We agree to the transfer,” she said. “But it’s going to be complicated. It’s going to take some time. There are factors I don’t think you appreciate. We’ll do it, but we’re going to expect some minimum cooperation from you along the way.”
Tony nodded. “Like what?”
“I’ll discuss that with Hobie,” she said. “Not with you.”
There was silence in the office. Just faint noises from the world outside. She concentrated on her breathing. In and out, in and out.
“OK,” Tony said.
Score three, she thought.
“We want coffee,” she said. “Three cups, cream and sugar.”
More silence. Then Tony nodded and the thickset man stood up. He looked away and walked out of the office toward the kitchen. Score four, she thought.
THE RETURN ADDRESS on Rutter’s letter corresponded to a dingy storefront some blocks south of any hope of urban renewal. It was a clapboard building sandwiched between crumbling four-story brick structures that may have been factories or warehouses before they were abandoned decades ago. Rutter’s place had a filthy window on the left and an entrance in the center and a roll-up door standing open on the right revealing a narrow garage area. There was a brand-new Lincoln Navigator squeezed into the space. Reacher recognized the model from advertisements he’d seen. It was a giant four-wheel-drive Ford, with a thick gloss of luxury added in order to justify its elevation to the Lincoln division. This one was metallic black, and it was probably worth more than the real estate wrapped around it.