Night School

by Child, Lee

  Neagley slid the second stack into position. She caught Reacher’s eye and winked. He nodded. The Hamburg expat was top of the pile. The counterculture guy, with the shock of hair. Klopp rejected him immediately. Reacher saw why. No cheek bones, and pouty rosebud lips, not a thin unsmiling slash.

  The discard pile grew tall.

  There was no possibles pile.

  Neagley slid the third stack into position. Klopp got to work. The translator sat quiet. Griezman went out and came back and a minute later a man came in with a pot of coffee and five cups. Klopp didn’t pause. He took cards off Neagley’s stack, one at a time, left thumb and index finger, and brought them closer to him, and looked at them, and slapped them down, one after the other.

  The discard pile grew taller.

  There was still no possibles pile.

  Klopp said something in German, and the translator said, “He apologizes for not being more helpful.”

  Reacher said, “Ask him how sure he is about his discards.”

  She did, and said, “A hundred percent.”

  “That’s impressive.”

  “He says he has that kind of mind.” Then she paused. She glanced at Reacher, who had told her to tell him everything, and then at Griezman, as if for permission to do so. She said, “Mr. Klopp trained as an auditor, in East Germany, and was second-in-command at a very large factory near the Polish border. He wishes us to understand he is overqualified for his current position. But all the better jobs here in the west are prohibited to ethnic Germans and given instead to people from Turkey.”

  “Does he want to take a break? He’s got about eighty more to look at.”

  She asked, and he answered, and she said, “He is happy to continue. He has the American’s face fixed firmly in his mind. Either it is here or it is not. He invites you to check his work against the sketch he will produce with our artist. He thinks you will find his conclusions to be accurate.”

  “OK, tell him to get it done.”

  There was nothing in the fourth stack. Not even a possible. A hundred and sixty gone by. Neagley slid the final forty into place. Reacher watched Klopp. One card at a time, left thumb and index finger, held easy, not near and not far. Decent vision, with his glasses on. Genuine concentration. Not a bored blank stare or an impatient sneer. A calm focus. He was interrogating the photographs, one by one, point by point. Eyes, cheek bones, mouth. Yes or no.

  No, time after time. Always no. The cards slapped down. By that point Reacher had seen more than a hundred and seventy versions of what the guy wasn’t. Which started to define what he was. Which was what Klopp had said. Deep-set blue eyes, prominent cheek bones, a thin nose, an unsmiling mouth, a firm chin. There were no other variants left. All under hair currently the color of straw, currently normal on the sides and long on the top. Like a style.

  Reacher watched.

  The discard pile grew taller.

  There was still no possibles pile.

  Then Klopp scrabbled up the last card, and looked at it, the same focus as every other card, and he put it on the discard pile.

  —

  Reacher called from Griezman’s office. He got Landry, who got Vanderbilt, who got White, who sounded sleepy. It was five o’clock in the morning in Virginia. Reacher said, “The guy saw the rendezvous. No doubt about it. The choreography was exactly right. The odds against the same type of thing happening in the same neighborhood at the same time are astronomical.”

  “Did he ID the American?”

  “No,” Reacher said. “Ratcliffe is wrong. This is not about computers. He put two whispers together, for no reason at all. There’s no connection. They’re separate. Just random.”

  “OK, we better tell him. You better get back here.”

  “No,” Reacher said. “We’re staying.”

  Chapter 12

  The sketch artist wanted to work alone, so Griezman took Reacher and Neagley on a walking tour of the station. They saw more interview rooms, and offices for officers, and squad rooms, and the booking area, and the holding cells, and the evidence room, and a cafeteria. Serious people were working hard everywhere. Griezman seemed proud of it all. Reacher figured he should. It was impressive.

  They pushed through a door and took a second-story pedestrian skybridge to a new part of the complex. The science center. Forensics. The labs. First up was a large white room with ranks of computers on long white benches. Griezman said, “We think this is how people will steal from each other in the future. Already three percent of Germans use the internet. More than fifteen percent in your own country. And we’re sure it will grow.”

  They walked on, past clean rooms with airlock doors. Like operating rooms in a hospital. Chemical analysis, firearms, blood, tissue, DNA. Laboratory benches, hundreds of glass tubes, all kinds of weird machines. The budget must have been immense. Griezman said, “The university co-funds some of it. Their scientists work here. Which is good for both of us. And we get a lot of federal money, too. It’s a shared facility. For the German army also, under certain circumstances.”

  Reacher nodded. Like Waterman had said, back in cooperation school.

  They took stairs down to the ground floor. The air was fresher, like there was open access to the outside. They went through a door to a vehicle bay. Like a service station or a tire shop, but immaculately clean. Almost antiseptic. Slick white paint on the floor, white tile on the walls, bright white light. No oil stains, no dirt, no clutter. There were two vehicles in there. One was a big sedan, with a damaged front corner. Worse than a fender bender, but not a wreck. Not a write-off. Griezman said, “There was a hit-and-run accident. A child was badly injured. The driver didn’t stop. We think this was the car. The owner denies it. We hope to find blood and fibers. But it will be a challenge.”

  The other car in the shop was a pretty little coupe, with its doors standing open. A guy in a white coat was leaning in. Griezman said, “We’re fingerprinting the inside. There was a homicide. We think the perpetrator might have been the victim’s last passenger. She was a prostitute. It can be a dangerous profession.”

  Reacher wandered over and took a look. It was a cute car, especially compared to his recycled Caprice. And immaculate. It shone under the lights. It fit right in with the antiseptic atmosphere. He said, “This is a very clean automobile.”

  Griezman said, “So was her apartment.”

  “Did she have a housekeeper?”

  “A service, I think.”

  “Then she probably had her car washed, too. Maybe on a regular basis. Waxed and detailed. Inside and out. Which is good. Not many old prints.”

  Griezman spoke German to the guy in the lab coat. A request for a progress report, possibly. The guy answered and pointed here and there. Griezman stuck his head in for a better view. Then he backed out again, ponderously, and said, “We think there’s a partial left thumb on the seat belt release. But it’s narrow, because the button is ridged. And smudged somehow. Possibly the same thing on the seat belt tongue, but the surface is hopeless. Hard plastic, with tiny pimples for grip. A regulation, no doubt. We should have a word with the department concerned. They’re not helping us.”

  Reacher said, “What kind of a car is this?”

  Griezman said, “It’s an Audi.”

  “Then Audi has already helped you. I had a friend with the same problem. About a year ago. Fort Hood, which is about the same size as Hamburg. Off-post married quarters. A Jaguar, not an Audi, but they’re both premium brands. They put chrome on their door-release levers. Looks expensive, feels great, and it gleams in the dark so you can find it. All of which enhances what they call the user experience. The passenger puts his middle finger in and pulls. Not his little finger, because he thinks it’s too weak, and not his ring finger, because he thinks it’s too clumsy, and not his index finger, because his wrist would need to rotate an extra twenty-five percent, which borders on the uncomfortable. Always his middle finger. So you need to take the door apart, and print the back of the lev
er. That’s what my friend would say.”

  The guy in the lab coat said something in German. Unknown words, but an indignant tone. Clearly he could follow along in English. Griezman said, “That was going to be our next step anyway. Did your friend secure a conviction?”

  “No,” Reacher said. “The chain of evidence broke down. He could prove the guy’s print was on the lever, but he couldn’t prove the lever came from the ex-wife’s car. Defense counsel said it could have come from anywhere.”

  “What should he have done?”

  “Before he started he should have engraved his initials on the front of the lever. While it was still right there on the door. With a dentist’s drill. He should have had himself photographed doing it. Wide shots, to establish the car, and then close ups.”

  Griezman spoke in German, a long list of instructions. Reacher caught the word zahnarzt, which he knew from having a toothache in Frankfurt meant dentist. The guy in the lab coat listened and nodded.

  —

  They got back to the interview room just as Klopp was getting set to leave. The sketch artist gave them a copy of a drawing made with colored pencils. Griezman told them he would fax a further copy to McLean, Virginia, and then keep the original on file.

  Reacher and Neagley carried their copy to the door, where the wired-glass window let in some natural light. The American looked exactly like Klopp had described. The artist had done a fine job capturing his words. The wave of blond hair. The skin stretched tight over the skull beneath. The brow and the cheek bones, horizontal and parallel and close together, like two bars on an old-style football helmet, with the eyes flashing out from way behind. The mouth, like a gash. Plus two vertical lines, the nose like a blade, and a crease down the right cheek, as if the most the mouth ever moved was in a lopsided and sardonic smile. The guy was shown in a jacket like Reacher’s. Pale tan denim, authentic in every respect. Under it was a white T-shirt. His collar bones stood out, like his cheek bones. His neck was shown corded with sinew. A hardscrabble guy, no longer young.

  Neagley said, “Military?”

  Reacher said, “Can’t tell by looking.”

  “Then why are we staying?”

  “I don’t know. Ratcliffe said we could have what we want. I guess what I want is not to be trapped in someone else’s mistake.”

  “The second rendezvous might not even be in Hamburg.”

  “I agree. It’s probably ten to one against. Which means if we stick around we have a one-in-ten chance of being in the right place at the right time. Whereas if we go back to Virginia we have a zero chance. They’re not going to meet at the Washington Monument. That’s for damn sure.”

  The translator came over and said, “Mr. Klopp is asking when you want to schedule the rest of the debriefing session.”

  Reacher said, “Tell Mr. Klopp we’re done with him. Tell him if I ever see him again I’ll pop his eyeballs out one at a time with my thumbnail.”

  Then Griezman came over and said, “Will you be my guests for lunch?”

  Twelve noon, in Hamburg, Germany.

  —

  Which was one o’clock in the afternoon in Kiev, Ukraine. The messenger was getting off a plane. He had been driven through the mountains to Peshawar in Pakistan, and had flown to Karachi, and then to Kiev. He had used a different passport for each of the flights, and he had changed his shirt once, from pink to black, and added shades and a Donetsk soccer supporter’s hat. He was untraceable and anonymous. Ukraine border control gave him no problems. He walked through baggage claim and out of the terminal. He joined the taxi line and smoked a cigarette while he waited.

  The taxi was an old Czech Skoda, and he told the driver the address he wanted, which was a flower market five streets from his real destination, which was a small apartment occupied by four of the faithful from Turkmenistan and Somalia. A safe house. Always better to make the final approach on foot. Taxi drivers remembered things, the same as anyone else. Some even made notes. Mileage logs, gasoline consumption, addresses. He didn’t know the four guys. But they were expecting him. Kiev was not the same as Hamburg. He couldn’t just walk in. A messenger had been sent ahead. Of the messenger. Such were the necessary precautions.

  He got out of the Skoda at the flower market. He walked between stalls crowded with bright blooms, into a humid hall full of rarer specimens, and when he came out the other end he was back in his pink shirt and the hat and the sunglasses were gone.

  He walked the final five blocks and found the right building. It was a squat concrete tower, set off-center in a row of older and more elegant buildings. Like a false tooth. As if long ago a bomb had fallen, randomly, and made a space. Perhaps it had. The lobby smelled of ammonia. The elevator worked, but with unpleasant noises. The upstairs hallways were narrow.

  He knocked on the door and waited. He counted the seconds in his head. He had knocked on a lot of doors. He knew how it worked. One, they hear the knock, two, they get up off the couch, three, they thread around the clutter, four, they step to the door, five, they open it.

  The door opened. A guy stood there. On his own, with silence behind him.

  The messenger said, “You’re expecting me.”

  The guy said, “We have to go out.”

  “When?”

  “Now.”

  The guy was Somali, the messenger thought. In his twenties, but already worn down to nothing but dusty skin and sinew. Primitive, like an ancestor species. The messenger said, “I don’t want to go out. I’m tired. I have to be on my way first thing in the morning. I have an onward flight.”

  “No choice. We have to go out.”

  “The point of a safe house is that I don’t have to go out.”

  “The Kiev soccer team is playing an evening game in Moscow. It’s on the television in the bars. It starts soon, because of the time zones. It would be weird for us not to go. We would stand out.”

  “You can go.”

  “We can’t have anyone in the apartment. Not this afternoon. Someone would notice. It’s a big rivalry. Like a patriotic thing. We’re supposed to fit in here.”

  The messenger shrugged. Such were the necessary precautions. And soccer wasn’t so bad. He had once seen it played with a human head. He said, “OK.”

  They took the stairs down, an unspoken agreement not to risk the elevator. They walked away from the flower market, in a new direction, past grand but faded apartment houses, with rusted ironwork and peeling stucco façades, and then between two of them into an alley the Somali said was a shortcut. It was a narrow brick passage, echoing and almost uncomfortable, but a building’s depth later it opened out into a small courtyard, not much bigger than a room, which was walled in by the blank four-story backs of other buildings. There was a small patch of sky, way up high. The walls were pierced here and there by blind or whitewashed windows, and they carried fat rainwater pipes and aimless loops of antenna cable.

  There were three guys in the courtyard.

  The messenger thought one of them could be the Somali’s cousin. The other two were also a pair. From Turkmenistan, no doubt. The guys from the safe house. For a happy second the messenger thought they were meeting there and all going to the bar together. Then he saw there was no other exit from the courtyard.

  Not a shortcut.

  It was a trap.

  And then he understood. Clear as day. Perfectly logical. He was a security risk. Because he knew the price. A hundred million dollars. Which was the single most dangerous component of the whole enterprise. Such a huge amount would set alarm bells ringing everywhere. Anyone who knew about it was automatically a potential leak. Classic theory. They had studied it in the camps, with hypothetical examples. They had gamed it out. A pity, they had said. But necessary. A great struggle required great sacrifices. A great struggle required clear minds and cold hearts. The guy sent on ahead had not asked for the guest quarters to be aired out and made ready. He had carried a different instruction.

  The messenger stood still. He
would never talk. Not him. They must know that. After all that he had done. He was different. He was safe. Wasn’t he?

  No, these were men who played soccer with human heads. They had no room for sentiment.

  The Somali guy said, “I’m sorry, brother.”

  The messenger closed his eyes. Not guns, he thought. Not in the center of Kiev. It would be knives.

  He was wrong. It was a hammer.

  —

  In Jalalabad it was half past four in the afternoon. Tea was being served in the white mud house. The new messenger had been brought to the small hot room. She was a woman. Twenty-four years old, long black hair, skin the color of tea. She was wearing a white explorer shirt, full of loops and pockets, and khaki pants, and desert boots. She was standing at attention in front of the two men, who were sitting on their cushions.

  The tall man said, “It’s a matter of very little importance, but there’s a need for speed. So you’ll fly direct from Karachi. No need for caution. No one has ever seen you before. You’ll meet with an American and you’ll tell him we accept his price. Repeat, we accept his price. Do you understand?”

  The woman said, “Yes, sir.”

  The fat man said, “The American won’t mention the price, and you won’t ask. It has to stay a secret. Because he’s embarrassed we beat him down so low, and on our part we don’t want the others to think we’re broke and that’s all we can afford.”

  The woman inclined her head.

  She said, “When shall I leave?”

  “Now,” the tall man said. “Drive all night. Get the morning plane.”