by Lee Child
Silence again, apart from domestic noises in the kitchen.
“So she’s worried,” Blake said. “Not really panicked, I guess, because one in eighty-eight isn’t bad odds, but it’s bad enough for her to be taking it real personal.”
Reacher nodded, slowly.
“Then she shouldn’t be working the case,” he said. “She’s too involved.”
Blake shrugged. “She insisted. It was my judgment call. I’m happy with it. Pressure can produce results.”
“Not for her. She’s a loose cannon.”
“She’s my lead profiler. She’s effectively driving this case. So I need her, involved or not. And she needs you as a go-between, and I need results, so you need to cut her a little slack.”
He sat back and stared at Reacher. A fat old man, uncomfortable in his suit, sweating in the nighttime chill, with something uncompromising in his face. I need results. Reacher had no problem with people who needed results. But he said nothing. There was a long silence. Then Lamarr came back into the room, carrying the pot from the machine. Her face was pale again. She had recovered her composure.
“I’m standing by my profile,” she said. “The guy’s somebody exactly like you. Maybe somebody you used to know. Maybe somebody you worked with.”
Reacher looked up at her. “I’m sorry about your personal situation.”
“I don’t need your sympathy. I need to catch the guy.”
“Well, good luck.”
She bent and poured coffee into Blake’s mug, and then walked over to Reacher’s.
“Thank you,” he said.
“You going to help us?” she asked.
He shook his head. “No.”
“What about an advisory role?” Blake asked. “Purely consultative? Deep background?”
Reacher shook his head again. “No, not interested.”
“What about something entirely passive?” Blake asked. “Just brainstorming? We feel you could be close to the guy. At least maybe close to the type of guy.”
“Not my bag,” Reacher said.
There was silence.
“Would you agree to be hypnotized?” Blake asked.
“Hypnotized? Why?”
“Maybe you could recall something buried. You know, some guy making some threats, some adverse comments. Something you didn’t pay too much attention to at the time. Might come back to you. Might help us piece something together.”
“You still do hypnotism?”
“Sometimes,” Blake said. “It can help. Julia’s an expert. She’d do it.”
“In that case, no thanks. She might make me walk down Fifth Avenue naked.”
Silence again. Blake looked away, then he turned back.
“Last time, Reacher,” he said. “The Bureau is asking for your help. We employ advisers all the time. You’d get paid and everything. Yes or no?”
“This is what hauling me in was all about, right?”
Blake nodded. “Sometimes it works.”
“How?”
Blake paused, and then he decided to answer. Reacher saw a guy prepared to be frank, in the interests of being persuasive.
“It shakes people up,” Blake said. “You know, make them feel they’re the prime suspect, then tell them they’re not, the emotional flip-flop can make them feel a sort of gratitude toward us. Makes them want to help us out.”
“That’s your experience?”
Blake nodded again. “It works, more often than not.”
Reacher shrugged. “I never studied much psychology. ”
“Psychology is our trade, manner of speaking,” Blake said.
“Kind of cruel, don’t you think?”
“The Bureau does what it has to do.”
“Evidently.”
“So, yes or no?”
“No.”
Silence in the room.
“Why not?”
“Because your emotional flip-flop didn’t work on me, I guess.”
“Can we have a formal reason, for the record?”
“Ms. Lamarr is the formal reason. She pisses me off.”
Blake spread his hands, helplessly. “But she’s only pissing you off to make the flip-flop work. It’s a technique. ”
Reacher made a face.
“Well, she’s a little too convincing,” he said. “Take her off the case and I might consider it.”
Lamarr glowered and Blake shook his head.
“I won’t do that,” he said. “That’s my call and I won’t be dictated to.”
“Then my answer is no.”
Silence. Blake turned the corners of his mouth down.
“We talked with Deerfield before we came up here,” he said. “You can understand we’d do that, right? As a courtesy? He authorized us to tell you Cozo will drop the racketeering charge if you play ball.”
“I’m not worried about the racketeering charge.”
“You should be. Protection rackets stink, you know that? They ruin businesses, they ruin lives. If Cozo scripts it right, some local jury of Tribeca traders is going to hate your guts.”
"I’m not worried about it,” Reacher said again. "I’ll beat it in a second. I stopped it, remember? I didn’t start it. Jury of Tribeca merchants, I’ll look like Robin Hood.”
Blake nodded and ducked his head and wiped his lips with his fingers.
“Problem is it could be more than a racketeering charge. One of those guys is critical. We just heard from Bellevue. Broken skull. He dies, it’s a homicide charge.”
Reacher laughed. “Good try, Blake. But nobody got a broken skull tonight. Believe me, I want to break somebody’s skull, I know how to do it. It wouldn’t happen by accident. So let’s hear the rest of them.”
“The rest of what?”
“The big threats. Bureau does what it has to do, right? You’re willing to move right on into the gray areas. So let’s hear what other big threats you’ve got lined up for me.”
“We just want you to play ball here.”
“I know that. And I want to hear how far you’re prepared to go.”
“We’ll go as far as we have to. We’re the Bureau, Reacher. We’re under pressure here. We’re not going to waste time. We got none to waste.”
Reacher sipped his coffee. It tasted better than when he made it. Maybe she used more grounds. Or less. “So give me the bad news.”
“IRS audit.”
“You think I’m worried about an IRS audit? I’ve got nothing to hide. They find some income I’ve forgotten about, I’ll be extremely grateful, is all. I could use the cash.”
“Your girlfriend, too.”
Reacher laughed again. “Jodie’s a Wall Street lawyer, for God’s sake. Big firm, nearly a partner. She’ll tie the IRS in a knot without even thinking about it.”
“We’re serious, Reacher.”
“Not so far, you’re not.”
Blake looked at the floor. “Cozo’s got guys on the street, working undercover. Petrosian’s going to be asking who did his boys last night. Cozo’s guys could let your name slip.”
“So?”
“They could tell him where you live.”
“And that’s supposed to scare me? Look at me, Blake. Get real. There’s maybe ten people on the planet I need to be scared of. Extremely unlikely this guy Petrosian happens to be one of them. So he wants to come up here for me, I’ll float him back to town in a box, all the way down the river.”
“He’s a hard guy, is what I hear.”
“I’m sure he’s real hard. But is he hard enough?”
“Cozo says he’s a sexual deviant. His executions always involve some sexual element. And the corpses are always explicitly displayed, naked, mutilated, really bizarre. Men or women, he doesn’t care. Deerfield told us all about that. We talked to him about it.”
“I’ll take my chances.”
Blake nodded. “We thought you’d say that. We’re good judges of character. That’s our trade, in a manner of speaking. So we asked ourselves how you’d
react to something else. Suppose it’s not your name and address Cozo leaks to Petrosian? What if it’s your girlfriend’s name and address?”
6
"WHAT ARE YOU going to do?” Jodie asked.
“I don’t know,” Reacher said.
“I can’t believe they’re acting like this.”
They were in Jodie’s kitchen, four floors above lower Broadway in Manhattan. Blake and Lamarr had left him in Garrison and twenty restless minutes later he had driven south to the city. Jodie came home at six in the morning looking for breakfast and a shower and found him waiting in her living room.
“Are they serious?”
“I don’t know. Probably.”
“Shit, I can’t believe it.”
“They’re desperate,” he said. “And they’re arrogant. And they like to win. And they’re an elite group. Put it all together, this is how they behave. I’ve seen it before. Some of our guys were exactly the same. They did what it takes.”
“How long have you got?”
“I have to call them by eight. With a decision.”
“So what are you going to do?”
“I don’t know,” he said again.
Her coat was over the back of a kitchen chair. She was pacing nervously, back and forth in her peach dress. She had been awake and alert for twenty-three straight hours, but there was nothing to prove it except a faint blue tinge at the inside corners of her eyes.
“They can’t get away with this, can they?” she said. “Maybe they’re not serious.”
“Maybe they’re not,” he said. “But it’s a game, right? A gamble? One way or the other, we’re going to worry about it. Forever.”
She dropped into a chair and crossed her legs. Put her head back and shook her hair until it fell behind her shoulders. She was everything Julia Lamarr was not. A visitor from outer space would categorize them both as women, with the same parts in the same quantities, hair and eyes and mouths and arms and legs, but one was a dream and the other was a nightmare.
“It just went too far,” he said. “My fault, absolutely. I was jerking them around, because I just didn’t like her at all, from the start. So I figured I’d tease them a little, keep it going, and then eventually say yes. But they dropped this on me, before I could get around to it.”
“So get them to take it back. Start over. Cooperate.”
He shook his head. “No, threatening me is one thing. You, that’s way over the line. They’re prepared to even think a thing like that, then to hell with them.”
“But were they really serious?” she said again.
“Safest strategy is assume they might be.”
She nodded. “So I’m scared. And I guess I’d still be a little scared, even if they took it back.”
“Exactly,” he said. “What’s done is done.”
“But why? Why are they so desperate? Why the threats?”
“History,” he said. “You know what it’s like. Everybody hates everybody else. Blake said that to me. And it’s true. MPs wouldn’t piss on Quantico if it was on fire. Because of Vietnam. Your dad could have told you all about it. He’s an example.”
“What happened about Vietnam?”
“There was a rule of thumb, draft dodgers were the Bureau’s business, and deserters were ours. Different categories, right? And we knew how to handle deserters. Some of them went to the slammer, but some of them got a little TLC. The jungle wasn’t a lot of fun for the grunts, and the recruiting depots weren’t exactly bulging at the seams, remember? So the MPs would calm the good ones down and send them back, but nine times out of ten the Bureau would arrest them again anyway, on the way to the airport. Drove the MPs crazy. Hoover was unbearable. It was a turf war like you never saw. Result was a perfectly reasonable guy like Leon would hardly even speak to the FBI ever again. Wouldn’t take calls, didn’t bust a gut answering the mail.”
“And it’s still the same?”
He nodded. “Institutions have long memories. That stuff is like yesterday. Never forgive, never forget.”
“Even though women are in danger?”
He shrugged. “Nobody ever said institutional thinking is rational.”
“So they really need somebody?”
“If they want to get anywhere.”
“But why you?”
“Lots of reasons. I was involved with a couple of the cases, they could find me, I was senior enough to know where to look for things, senior enough that the current generation probably still owes me a few favors. ”
She nodded. “So put it all together, they probably are serious.”
He said nothing.
“So what are we going to do?”
He paused.
“We could think laterally,” he said into the silence.
“How?”
“You could come with me.”
She shook her head. “They wouldn’t let me come with you. And I can’t, anyway. Could be weeks, right? I have to work. The partnership decision is coming up.”
He nodded. “We could do it another way.”
“OK, how?”
“I could go take Petrosian out.”
She stared at him. Said nothing.
“No more threat,” he said. “Like trumping their ace.”
She turned her stare to the ceiling, and then she shook her head again, slowly.
“We have a thing at the firm,” she said. “We call it the so what else rule. Suppose we’ve got some bankrupt guy we’re looking after. Sometimes we dig around and find he’s got some funds stashed away that he’s not telling us about. He’s hiding them from us. He’s cheating. First thing we do, we say so what else? What else is he doing? What else has he got?”
“So?”
“So what are they really doing here? Maybe this is not about the women at all. Maybe this is about Petrosian. He’s presumably a smart, slippery guy. Maybe there’s nothing to pin on him. No evidence, no witnesses. So maybe Cozo is using Blake and Lamarr to get you to get Petrosian. They profiled you, right? Psychologically? They know how you think. They know how you’ll react. They know if they use Petrosian to threaten me, your very first thought will be to go get Petrosian. Then he’s off the street without a trial, which they probably couldn’t win anyway. And nothing is traceable back to the Bureau. Maybe they’re using you as an assassin. Like a guided missile or something. They wind you up, and off you go.”
He said nothing.
“Or maybe it’s something else,” she said. “This guy killing these women sounds pretty smart too, right? No evidence anywhere? Sounds like it’s going to be a difficult case to prove. So maybe the idea is you eliminate him. There might not be enough proof to satisfy the courts, but there might be enough to satisfy you. In which case you fix him, on behalf of the women you knew. Job done, cheap and quick, nothing traceable back. They’re using you like a magic bullet. They fire it here in New York, and it hits home wherever and whenever.”
Reacher was silent.
“Maybe you were never a suspect at all,” she said. “Maybe they weren’t looking for a killer. Maybe they were looking for somebody who would kill a killer.”
There was silence in the room. Outside, the street sounds of early morning were starting up. It was dark gray dawn, and traffic was building.
“Could be both things,” Reacher said. “Petrosian and this other guy.”
“They’re smart people,” Jodie said.
He nodded. “They sure as hell are.”
“So what are you going to do?”
“I don’t know. All I know is I can’t go to Quantico and leave you here alone in the same city as Petrosian. I just can’t do that.”
“But maybe they’re not serious. Would the FBI really do something like that?”
“You’re going around in a circle. The answer is, we just don’t know. And that’s the whole point. That’s the effect they wanted. Just not knowing is enough, isn’t it?”
“And if you don’t go?”
“Then
I stay here and guard you every minute of every day until we get fed up with it to the point where I go after Petrosian anyway, irrespective of whether they were kidding in the first place or not.”
“And if you do go?”
“Then they keep me on the ball with the threat against you. And in their opinion on the ball means what? Can I stop after I find the guy? Or do they make me go all the way and rub him out?”
“Smart people,” she said again.
“Why didn’t they just ask me straight?”
“They can’t just ask you. It would be a hundred percent illegal. And you mustn’t do it, anyway.”
“I can’t?”
“No, not Petrosian or the killer. You mustn’t do either thing they want.”
“Why not?”
“Because then they own you, Reacher. Two vigilante homicides, with their knowledge? Right under their noses? The Bureau would own you, the whole rest of your life.”
He leaned his hands on the window frame and stared at the street below.
“You’re in a hell of a spot,” she said. “We both are.”
He said nothing.
“So what are you going to do?” she asked again.
“I’m going to think,” he said. “I’ve got until eight o’clock.”
She nodded. “Think carefully.”
JODIE WENT BACK to work. The partnership track beckoned. Reacher sat alone in her apartment and thought hard for thirty minutes, and then he was on the phone for twenty. Blake had said maybe there are people who still owe you favors. Then at five minutes to eight he called the number Lamarr had given him. She answered, first ring.
“I’m in,” he said. “I’m not happy about it, but I’ll do it.”
There was a brief pause. He imagined the crooked teeth, revealed in a smile.
“Go home and pack a bag,” she said. “I’ll pick you up in two hours exactly.”
“No, I’m going to see Jodie. I’ll meet you at the airport.”
“We’re not going by plane.”
“We’re not?”
“No, I never fly. We’re driving.”
“To Virginia? How long will that take?”
“Five, six hours.”
“Six hours? In a car with you? Shit, I’m not doing that.”
“You’re doing what you’re told, Reacher. Garrison, in two hours.”